Notes From the Out-of-Touch: Wiping Out $90,000 in Student Loans in 7 Months

“I am so accomplished. I had money and wealth and used it. Follow my lead”

Harvard MBA Joe Mihalic, in what is supposed to be an inspirational story for all Americans, especially in light of the current student loan crisis, has made headlines  - most notably in the magazine of the Mecca of Greed – Wall Street Journal – for having paid $90,000 in student loans in seven months.

He accomplished this by getting a second job (in his case, landscaping), forgoing all restaurant dining (even McDonald’s), selling all unnecessary items around the house — and getting a flask.

Yes, a flask. Genius decided that one of the best and most effective ways to save money in this world is carrying your own booze around in a flask to bars rather than ordering drinks and shelling out $50 everytime.

Instead of the movies, he took dates out hiking, or for bagels and coffee. He ate protein bars packed from home and walked several miles to the city, to save a few bucks on transportation, during a trip to Michigan. He got two roommates to rent out his house. Mihalic also took steps that financial advisers typically say are a no-no: He liquidated his individual retirement account, drawing a tax penalty, and stopped contributing to his 401(k), even though his employer offers a matching contribution

Oh and yeah, did I mentioned one minor detail? The guy makes six figures working for Dell, Inc. As in $ 100,000 and above.

And therein lies the rub in this story of “inspiration” because pointing out the obvious,  namely that having wealth makes it easier to reduce debt, is neither inspirational nor newsworthy.

So thanks Wall Street wizards and thanks to this guy. He did not go to Harvard for nothin’.

No Kids, no wife, no health-care bills making six figure income and able to pay off debt. Reminds one of wrinkle cream commercials starring a twenty year old.

Fact is, you can’t pay off 90 grand in student loans taking a flask to the bar and selling household junk on ebay and saving a few bucks on a bus pass every day. This is utterly ridiculous and insulting to the whole movement aimed at keeping student loans and interest rates in check and affordable.

While the frugality tips are good, the point of the student debt  crisis is not Harvard Business School grads with six-figure incomes trying  to pay down student loans by “slumming” it for a while.  It’s people from middle-to bottom-tier schools with  no jobs, or very little income, drowning in $100k or similar amount of debt with high interest rates.

With a six figure income, this guy is already six steps ahead of most students buried in debt; students who don’t have jobs and if they do have a job, they are lucky to be making 35k and rent a room somewhere or move back to live with their parents.

Beside the six figure income, the other major factor in his “accomplishment”  is that he has a sizable amount of assets to slash his debt. According to his website, his after tax (i.e net) income was $85,000 per year. He immediately used around  $27,500 in cash plus $14,000 from stocks, and $9,500 from his IRA.  He also stated that his monthly entertainment expenses were $1,300… x 7 months= $9,100! He got two roommates bringing in $5,950 over seven  months. He sold a bicycle for $900 and a motorcycle and his second vehicle for another $9,500. A also received a tax refund of almost $1,900. A work bonus of almost $14,000 and  don’t forget that he was already paying $1,050+ each month to his  loans so there’s almost $7,400 already. He banked $4,000 from stopping his 401k. He got a raise for $2,300 over 7 months.

That alone is over $106,000 available to him in either assets or funds that he was already receiving without even delving into his regular monthly expenses,  i.e mortgage, utilities, cell phone, etc.

How in the world any of this is any kind of accomplishment that is news worthy is beyond me. I don’t need the WSJ telling me that having money greatly helps reducing your debt and improving your life.

Paying Off Student Loan Debt is Not Just a Matter of Discipline 

This is not an inspirational story, it is a harrowing tale of a privileged man using his considerable financial resources to pay off his debt. The reality for over 90% of students coming out of colleges and grad schools, however, is more like they are buried in student loans at high interest rates and have either no job or a job that barely pays for the necessities, such as room and board and basic bills, much less for astronomically high student loans.

In other words, Mihalic’s situation is neither typical nor representative of the situation of college and grad school graduates in this country and it certainly does not provide a realistic template with which to to approach the student loan crisis.

When you come out of college or grad school and make around 40k – and if you are lucky maybe your employer also throws in a health plan  - and after you paid your taxes and for your basic needs, there is not much room left to work with. And that is the issue. Mihalic had a lot of room to shuffle money around; he had options: top benefits, bonuses and promotions oh and yeah a six figure salary. The majority of grads don’t.

A young person having recently graduated from an institute of higher education should not have to suffer and subdue themselves with some minimum-wage paying slow death at all costs just to pay off student loans issued to them under draconian rates and conditions.

The point is to reform student loans and make college affordable so that people aren’t burdened and buried in debt just for getting an education.

Making it look like the problem was one of personal discipline alone as opposed to structural is what truly irks me about the press surrounding this guy’s alleged “accomplishment” because all it does is put a bandage  – a very expensive one – on the issue saying “Hey kids, stop whining about student loans. Do what this guy did (never mind most of you cannot) and you will be fine.”

When you don’t have any or much money, you don’t have many options. That is, after all, what is so great about money: options. Mihalic, on the other hand, had options and he used those options to adjust his life such that it was possible for him to pay off his student loan debt quickly. Many graduates in his place don’t have these kinds of options.

File that under yet another rich privileged dude doing what all rich, privileged dudes would do in his place: spend his money to be better off.

This country has taken the notion of finding ever newer and more creative ways to make fools out of people and insulting their intelligence to new heights.

Stupid Things People Do: Buy Kim Kuntrashian’s Used, Old Outfits on Ebay

For your consideration: Stupid people without dignity.

Case in point: pissed on whore turned reality TV skank and gold digger extraordinaire Kim Kardashian has decided to sell some of her pre-owned skank outfits on ebay.

The prices range from 400 to several thousand thanks to idiotic bidders who engage in pointless bidding wars days before the auction ends (another reason you know people buying her clothes are stupid:  bidding on ebay days and hours before an auction ends only inflates the price).

The worst part is that she is merely donating a portion of the proceeds to her chosen local cult, the Life Change Community Church,  She pockets the rest. Yes, she pockets the rest.

As if the millions she makes from fake marriages and paid for publicity stunts and for being nothing but a talentless slut were not enough,  now she also sells these clothes she probably did not even pay for in the first place because chances are  - much like everything else in her life – they were handed to her as part of her endorsement and promo deals.

The sad thing is that those people buying them are probably nothing but some poor, hard working yet at the same time desperate, money-grabbing skank wanna-bes for whom 900 dollars on a cum stained dress probably constitutes a major purchase they have to save up or go into debt for. All in an attempt to be a step closer to some good-for-nothing piece of garbage who has made a mockery of everyone.

 

Yeah, people are stupid and the Kuntrashians found a great way to bank on and milk this immense stupidity for all it’s worth. I don’t know who is to blame: this family of high grade whores or the people that keep endorsing them.

Screenshot from her actual ebay auction page. Who are these idiots that bid days in advance? If it didn’t increase the price, I would go in and troll by bidding and hiking up the prices. Come to think of it: these stupid fans do deserve being exploited. They are asking for it.

Yeah, American keeps embracing the stupid: one celebrity, incompetent politician and bible verse at a time.

 

Why Mitt Romney Has Crossed Into Groundbreaking Levels of Dishonesty

Mitt Romney is not the most honest guy. In fact, he has been accused, and rightly so, of having crossed into groundbreaking levels of dishonesty during this election year.

Aside from his blatant dishonesty in political matters, there is also something very insincere about him as a person. Whenever he is talking to a crowd, it feels awkward and forced, like he was citing rehearsed lines and catch phrases that he personally doesn’t understand or believe but which his campaign manager told him to say anyway because they are relevant and would score political points.  It is like he is forcing himself hard to say those things but because he doesn’t ultimately understand them, much less mean them, it feels insincere.

The man cannot even keep a coherent thought within the same sentence, much less the same campaign or specific policy. During a speech last month he stated that “we may make mistakes as a nation from time to time, and step on other’s toes and we’ll say we’re sorry for that, but apologizing for America is something I will never, ever do.”

Naturally, his audience of gullible sheep and uneducated religious morons wrapped in the US flag, holding a gun and cross, applauded at what he said.

But is that really something we should applaud and strive for in our leader and our nation for that matter? Is not apologizing for and acknowledging your mistakes a virtue? A desirable quality in a leader? Or anyone for that matter?

Do we want someone in the White House who is just too damn arrogant and self-absorbed to ever acknowledge any mistakes made and apologize for them?  Or do we want someone with integrity who does apologize and acknowledge mistakes made when the situation warrants it. Jingoists applaud him thinking it is really great to be a nation that bullies others around, disregards international law and institutions, causes war and havoc all over the world without never, ever apologizing for it.

Not only that but Romney lacks any situational awareness or any clue as to how the outlandish things he says have little basis in reality.  During a tele-town hall meeting with Wisconsin voters last month, Romney told what he thought was a “humorous” story about how his father once shut down a factory in Michigan and moved production to Wisconsin. This little, supposedly humorous anecdote, was no doubt meant to appeal to the voters of Wisconsin, who were the beneficiaries of the factory shutdown, but in his zeal to appear like he actually does have a clue what it means to have to do a hard day’s work in your life and be a man of the people, he missed the entire second half of his “joke”, namely that his daddy’s heroic attempt at opening a factory in Wisconsin cost 5000+ people in Michigan, where his father was Governor no less, their jobs. That is not funny. But Romney thinks it is because he doesn’t truly understand the consequences of his father’s actions.

He thinks like a businessman and not like a leader or humanitarian.  Hence missing the point entirely and thinking his daddy’s deed was hilarious.

And speaking of groundbreaking dishonesty: Paul Ryan wants to end Medicare, forcing seniors to go buy health insurance in the open market – since, you know, insurance companies are dying to insure seniors. Thirty three such seniors being thrown to the den of the insurance industry would help pay for the $200,000 tax break Ryan wants to give to the average millionaire.  But Mitt Romney, who supports the “bipartisan group of leaders” on Medicare (i.e. Ryan’s plan) accuses Obama of wanting to get rid of Medicare.

Romney’s presidential campaign is overflowing with such unembarrassed lies and acts of hypocrisy. In fact, he reached an even newer low on dishonesty when he, despite his 2008 call to “let Detroit go bankrupt,” said jus ta few weeks ago during an interview with WEWS-TV in Cleveland that he would “take a lot of credit” for his impact on the U.S. automobile industry’s comeback since his views helped save the industry..

“I pushed the idea of a managed bankruptcy,” Romney said. “And finally, when that was done, and help was given, the companies got back on their feet. So I’ll take a lot of credit for the fact that this industry’s come back.”

The reality looks different, however. Romney’s stance on and opposition to the bailouts and his infamous 2008 New York Times op-ed “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt” in support of those assertions, have come up throughout the campaign, especially ahead of February’s primary in Michigan. In that editorial, Romney argued that a government bailout for ailing auto giants Chrysler and General Motors would do more harm than good.

“If General Motors, Ford and Chrysler get the bailout that their chief executives asked for yesterday, you can kiss the American automotive industry goodbye,” Romney wrote. “In a managed bankruptcy, the federal government would propel newly competitive and viable automakers, rather than seal their fate with a bailout check.”

It is, of course, quite hypocritical of him to be against government bail outs when he received a $10 million bailout from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. in 1991. The taxpayers provided the backstop for the FDIC, and even though Bain & Co. went on to make millions more in profits, the fund was never replenished. A small detail that Romney and his supporters conveniently ignore when repeatedly speaking out against the auto industry bail out or any kind of government “interference”.

In this case, Mitt Romney, much like any opportunist,  saw the polls about the unpopularity of bailouts and lumped the auto industry in with the bank industry  - the auto industry, where his father and so many of his family members had worked – and called for them to go down. He never looked into the eyes of autoworkers getting laid off as factory after factory closed. The auto industry was heading over the cliff, begging for help, and Romney were coolly standing behind, giving his home state a shove over the ledge. And now he has the audacity to claim credit for the auto industry’s rebound.

 

Mitt Romney Demeans the intelligence of the American People with His Lies

it is important to point out that there is a real reason for why Romney always makes such comments with this dead-pan expression and without a twitch. There is a reason he and his wife – with their five houses, two Cadillacs with elevators and close friends who own football and baseball teams – think that sitting on $250 million of wealth, raising two shiny, life-like sons puts Ann Romney en par with 95% of mothers in this country who don’t enjoy any of those obscene luxuries and it is the reason why Romney says he is unemployed, comparing his quarter of a billion dollar wealth to the $ 7.50 an hour a laid off worker used to make. There is a reason Romney exhibits all the clichés we unfairly assign to used car salesmen, and the reason for that, aside from cold hard ignorance brought on by too much of someone else’s money and greed, is that Romney is genuinely and ridiculously out of touch with not only the citizens of this country but human beings residing on planet Earth in general.

In fact, he is so out of touch with them that any attempts at socializing with them or addressing them in a speech end up in such embarrassing, foot-in-mouth, bozo moments. He is trying hard to appear sincere but because there really is no subsistence and sincerity behind his vacant smile and lofty speeches, it just backfires and he just ends up looking like an asshole.

Mitt Romney is dishonest and his dishonesty just shines through, no matter what he does or how many catch-phrases and talking points he throws at you.  He is insincere and fake and a liar and most people (well most intelligent people, which a lot of Americans aren’t unfortunately) realize that.

Romney is one of those people who – in a very Twilight Zone fashion – deserves to be stripped off his wealth, fame and fortune and be rendered a pauper or maybe just an employee at one of the companies Bain Capital bankrupted to see for himself just what life feels like for people who actually have to earn a living instead of just having everything handed to them through theft and exploitation of others.

And make no mistake about it: a thief is exactly what Mitt Romney is. Someone who doesn’t pay his taxes or tries to avoid having to pay them but enjoys the benefits that a government that is paid for by taxes provides to him, is a thief.  People accuse him of flip flopping, but that is really not true because Romney has been pretty consistent throughout his political career with one thing and one thing only, namely amassing power and wealth for the few at the expense of the middle class.

He also did not get rich by creating products people wanted, he got rich by taking over companies, loading them up with debt, pushing them into bankruptcy, then laying people off and canceling their health benefits. As governor of Massachusetts he did the same thing: his party ruined the economy, he cut education, raised fees on the middle class to benefit the wealthy and his state  ranked 47 in job creation. So there is a consistent narrative there.

A lot of people argue that this is just nothing but begrudging someone of their wealth; jealousy. But such responses usually come from people who have a very narrow understanding of the mechanisms that have allowed people like Romney to become rich in the first place. Because let’s face it, no one becomes that obscenely rich without having stepped on people. It is the law of nature. Zero sum.

In order for one person to own more than other people combined, he has to take it away from them. Back in the day that was done directly, now it is in the form of low wages, high taxes (for middle class wage earners and poor people) and other structural means of exploitation.

Therefore telling people who criticize Mitt Romney and the 1% that they are begrudging them their wealth and “success” is like telling a burglary victim that their demands for justice to get their things back constitute begrudging thieves of their well earned riches.  It is absurd.

Mitt Romney is a corporate raider who made money bankrupting companies and with it the people that worked for them. So is criticism warranted? Is questioning his wealth, his motives and priorities as well as wanting to see ten years of tax returns,  an important question to ask when considering him for the office of the presidency?

You bet that it is.

If there is any kinds of questions one ought to ask potential future leaders then they are exactly of this nature. Someone who has no clue how 99% of the people in the world, much less the United States, live; someone who – in his heart of hearts – cannot relate to wage earners and people who don’t own sports teams no matter how hard he tries, is not fit to be the President. He is not fit to be a leader.

Mitt Romney wants to run this country like a business. In fact, his only claim for the presidency is that he is a great businessman and that he can apply those business principles that enriched Bain to this country. But the point of government is that it is not a business. In fact, a government cannot and ought not to be run like a business because by definition, the role of the government is governance and not a profit making, which is the goal of business.

Ultimately, America is not a corporation. America is an idea, a vision and someone like Mitt Romney would destroy that vision.

The only way a government can function as an effective, unbiased entity and governing body is when it does not have a profit motive. Imagine if the EPA was run by Koch industries or the FDA by Monstanto. Think cancer is an epidemic now? Wait for he pandemic levels it will reach when Koch and Monstanto are in charge.

Mitt Romney, while a rich man, is free of the ravages of intelligence and I must say that I do find it degrading for Obama to even have to stoop so low and debate someone so intellectually and emotionally challenged and inferior as Mitt Romney. Someone with such a fundamental weakness of character.

Romney does not have the class, etiquette or even level of Obama. He has little integrity, in fact he is a proven liar, he lacks empathy and his flip flopping, while subject to a lot of good jokes, really is just dangerous.

An opportunist is worse than someone who actually takes a stand on something, be it on the Left or Right.

Romney has no integrity, neither does his wife and neither does the entire cause of Republicans in this election; causes that are aimed at destroying everything this country was founded on and which made it what it is today.

Don’t think for one second that being born with a silver spoon in your mouth and robbing people, as Romney did, gives you class, integrity or renders you a capable leader. We don’t need anyone in The White House who only caters to the needs of the few rich at the expense of everyone else and who views women as second class citizens. We need men of honor and integrity and while I personally have not been very happy with a lot of Obama’s policy decisions, such as extending tax breaks to the rich and how he handled BP and health care, he has proven to have more integrity and honor than any of these GOP candidates could ever dream of having, especially Mitt Romney.

I would hope that people care enough to remember these things when casting a vote this fall.

Why I Am Not A Christian – Bertrand Russell

Bertrand Russell delivered this lecture on March 6, 1927 to the National Secular Society, South London Branch, at Battersea Town Hall. Published in pamphlet form in that same year, the essay subsequently achieved new fame with Paul Edwards’ edition of Russell’s book, Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays. 

Yesterday the National Day of Prayer was imposed on all of us by the government. Today I like to counter the mass delusion such a day elicits by reposting Russell’s famous 1927 essay. 

—–

As your Chairman has told you, the subject about which I am going to speak to you tonight is “Why I Am Not a Christian.” Perhaps it would be as well, first of all, to try to make out what one means by the word Christian. It is used these days in a very loose sense by a great many people. Some people mean no more by it than a person who attempts to live a good life. In that sense I suppose there would be Christians in all sects and creeds; but I do not think that that is the proper sense of the word, if only because it would imply that all the people who are not Christians — all the Buddhists, Confucians, Mohammedans, and so on — are not trying to live a good life. I do not mean by a Christian any person who tries to live decently according to his lights. I think that you must have a certain amount of definite belief before you have a right to call yourself a Christian. The word does not have quite such a full-blooded meaning now as it had in the times of St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas. In those days, if a man said that he was a Christian it was known what he meant. You accepted a whole collection of creeds which were set out with great precision, and every single syllable of those creeds you believed with the whole strength of your convictions.

What Is a Christian?

Nowadays it is not quite that. We have to be a little more vague in our meaning of Christianity. I think, however, that there are two different items which are quite essential to anybody calling himself a Christian. The first is one of a dogmatic nature — namely, that you must believe in God and immortality. If you do not believe in those two things, I do not think that you can properly call yourself a Christian. Then, further than that, as the name implies, you must have some kind of belief about Christ. The Mohammedans, for instance, also believe in God and in immortality, and yet they would not call themselves Christians. I think you must have at the very lowest the belief that Christ was, if not divine, at least the best and wisest of men. If you are not going to believe that much about Christ, I do not think you have any right to call yourself a Christian. Of course, there is another sense, which you find in Whitaker’s Almanack and in geography books, where the population of the world is said to be divided into Christians, Mohammedans, Buddhists, fetish worshipers, and so on; and in that sense we are all Christians. The geography books count us all in, but that is a purely geographical sense, which I suppose we can ignore.Therefore I take it that when I tell you why I am not a Christian I have to tell you two different things: first, why I do not believe in God and in immortality; and, secondly, why I do not think that Christ was the best and wisest of men, although I grant him a very high degree of moral goodness.

But for the successful efforts of unbelievers in the past, I could not take so elastic a definition of Christianity as that. As I said before, in olden days it had a much more full-blooded sense. For instance, it included he belief in hell. Belief in eternal hell-fire was an essential item of Christian belief until pretty recent times. In this country, as you know, it ceased to be an essential item because of a decision of the Privy Council, and from that decision the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Archbishop of York dissented; but in this country our religion is settled by Act of Parliament, and therefore the Privy Council was able to override their Graces and hell was no longer necessary to a Christian. Consequently I shall not insist that a Christian must believe in hell.

The Existence of God

To come to this question of the existence of God: it is a large and serious question, and if I were to attempt to deal with it in any adequate manner I should have to keep you here until Kingdom Come, so that you will have to excuse me if I deal with it in a somewhat summary fashion. You know, of course, that the Catholic Church has laid it down as a dogma that the existence of God can be proved by the unaided reason. That is a somewhat curious dogma, but it is one of their dogmas. They had to introduce it because at one time the freethinkers adopted the habit of saying that there were such and such arguments which mere reason might urge against the existence of God, but of course they knew as a matter of faith that God did exist. The arguments and the reasons were set out at great length, and the Catholic Church felt that they must stop it. Therefore they laid it down that the existence of God can be proved by the unaided reason and they had to set up what they considered were arguments to prove it. There are, of course, a number of them, but I shall take only a few.

The First-cause Argument

Perhaps the simplest and easiest to understand is the argument of the First Cause. (It is maintained that everything we see in this world has a cause, and as you go back in the chain of causes further and further you must come to a First Cause, and to that First Cause you give the name of God.) That argument, I suppose, does not carry very much weight nowadays, because, in the first place, cause is not quite what it used to be. The philosophers and the men of science have got going on cause, and it has not anything like the vitality it used to have; but, apart from that, you can see that the argument that there must be a First Cause is one that cannot have any validity. I may say that when I was a young man and was debating these questions very seriously in my mind, I for a long time accepted the argument of the First Cause, until one day, at the age of eighteen, I read John Stuart Mill’s Autobiography, and I there found this sentence: “My father taught me that the question ‘Who made me?’ cannot be answered, since it immediately suggests the further question `Who made god?’” That very simple sentence showed me, as I still think, the fallacy in the argument of the First Cause. If everything must have a cause, then God must have a cause. If there can be anything without a cause, it may just as well be the world as God, so that there cannot be any validity in that argument. It is exactly of the same nature as the Hindu’s view, that the world rested upon an elephant and the elephant rested upon a tortoise; and when they said, “How about the tortoise?” the Indian said, “Suppose we change the subject.” The argument is really no better than that. There is no reason why the world could not have come into being without a cause; nor, on the other hand, is there any reason why it should not have always existed. There is no reason to suppose that the world had a beginning at all. The idea that things must have a beginning is really due to the poverty of our imagination. Therefore, perhaps, I need not waste any more time upon the argument about the First Cause.

The Natural-law Argument

Then there is a very common argument from natural law. That was a favorite argument all through the eighteenth century, especially under the influence of Sir Isaac Newton and his cosmogony. People observed the planets going around the sun according to the law of gravitation, and they thought that God had given a behest to these planets to move in that particular fashion, and that was why they did so. That was, of course, a convenient and simple explanation that saved them the trouble of looking any further for explanations of the law of gravitation. Nowadays we explain the law of gravitation in a somewhat complicated fashion that Einstein has introduced. I do not propose to give you a lecture on the law of gravitation, as interpreted by Einstein, because that again would take some time; at any rate, you no longer have the sort of natural law that you had in the Newtonian system, where, for some reason that nobody could understand, nature behaved in a uniform fashion. We now find that a great many things we thought were natural laws are really human conventions. You know that even in the remotest depths of stellar space there are still three feet to a yard. That is, no doubt, a very remarkable fact, but you would hardly call it a law of nature. And a great many things that have been regarded as laws of nature are of that kind. On the other hand, where you can get down to any knowledge of what atoms actually do, you will find they are much less subject to law than people thought, and that the laws at which you arrive are statistical averages of just the sort that would emerge from chance. There is, as we all know, a law that if you throw dice you will get double sixes only about once in thirty-six times, and we do not regard that as evidence that the fall of the dice is regulated by design; on the contrary, if the double sixes came every time we should think that there was design. The laws of nature are of that sort as regards a great many of them. They are statistical averages such as would emerge from the laws of chance; and that makes this whole business of natural law much less impressive than it formerly was. Quite apart from that, which represents the momentary state of science that may change tomorrow, the whole idea that natural laws imply a lawgiver is due to a confusion between natural and human laws. Human laws are behests commanding you to behave a certain way, in which you may choose to behave, or you may choose not to behave; but natural laws are a description of how things do in fact behave, and being a mere description of what they in fact do, you cannot argue that there must be somebody who told them to do that, because even supposing that there were, you are then faced with the question “Why did God issue just those natural laws and no others?” If you say that he did it simply from his own good pleasure, and without any reason, you then find that there is something which is not subject to law, and so your train of natural law is interrupted. If you say, as more orthodox theologians do, that in all the laws which God issues he had a reason for giving those laws rather than others — the reason, of course, being to create the best universe, although you would never think it to look at it — if there were a reason for the laws which God gave, then God himself was subject to law, and therefore you do not get any advantage by introducing God as an intermediary. You really have a law outside and anterior to the divine edicts, and God does not serve your purpose, because he is not the ultimate lawgiver. In short, this whole argument about natural law no longer has anything like the strength that it used to have. I am traveling on in time in my review of the arguments. The arguments that are used for the existence of God change their character as time goes on. They were at first hard intellectual arguments embodying certain quite definite fallacies. As we come to modern times they become less respectable intellectually and more and more affected by a kind of moralizing vagueness.

The Argument from Design

The next step in the process brings us to the argument from design. You all know the argument from design: everything in the world is made just so that we can manage to live in the world, and if the world was ever so little different, we could not manage to live in it. That is the argument from design. It sometimes takes a rather curious form; for instance, it is argued that rabbits have white tails in order to be easy to shoot. I do not know how rabbits would view that application. It is an easy argument to parody. You all know Voltaire’s remark, that obviously the nose was designed to be such as to fit spectacles. That sort of parody has turned out to be not nearly so wide of the mark as it might have seemed in the eighteenth century, because since the time of Darwin we understand much better why living creatures are adapted to their environment. It is not that their environment was made to be suitable to them but that they grew to be suitable to it, and that is the basis of adaptation. There is no evidence of design about it.

When you come to look into this argument from design, it is a most astonishing thing that people can believe that this world, with all the things that are in it, with all its defects, should be the best that omnipotence and omniscience have been able to produce in millions of years. I really cannot believe it. Do you think that, if you were granted omnipotence and omniscience and millions of years in which to perfect your world, you could produce nothing better than the Ku Klux Klan or the Fascists? Moreover, if you accept the ordinary laws of science, you have to suppose that human life and life in general on this planet will die out in due course: it is a stage in the decay of the solar system; at a certain stage of decay you get the sort of conditions of temperature and so forth which are suitable to protoplasm, and there is life for a short time in the life of the whole solar system. You see in the moon the sort of thing to which the earth is tending — something dead, cold, and lifeless.

I am told that that sort of view is depressing, and people will sometimes tell you that if they believed that, they would not be able to go on living. Do not believe it; it is all nonsense. Nobody really worries about much about what is going to happen millions of years hence. Even if they think they are worrying much about that, they are really deceiving themselves. They are worried about something much more mundane, or it may merely be a bad digestion; but nobody is really seriously rendered unhappy by the thought of something that is going to happen to this world millions and millions of years hence. Therefore, although it is of course a gloomy view to suppose that life will die out — at least I suppose we may say so, although sometimes when I contemplate the things that people do with their lives I think it is almost a consolation — it is not such as to render life miserable. It merely makes you turn your attention to other things.

The Moral Arguments for Deity

Now we reach one stage further in what I shall call the intellectual descent that the Theists have made in their argumentations, and we come to what are called the moral arguments for the existence of God. You all know, of course, that there used to be in the old days three intellectual arguments for the existence of God, all of which were disposed of by Immanuel Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason; but no sooner had he disposed of those arguments than he invented a new one, a moral argument, and that quite convinced him. He was like many people: in intellectual matters he was skeptical, but in moral matters he believed implicitly in the maxims that he had imbibed at his mother’s knee. That illustrates what the psychoanalysts so much emphasize — the immensely stronger hold upon us that our very early associations have than those of later times.

Kant, as I say, invented a new moral argument for the existence of God, and that in varying forms was extremely popular during the nineteenth century. It has all sorts of forms. One form is to say there would be no right or wrong unless God existed. I am not for the moment concerned with whether there is a difference between right and wrong, or whether there is not: that is another question. The point I am concerned with is that, if you are quite sure there is a difference between right and wrong, then you are in this situation: Is that difference due to God’s fiat or is it not? If it is due to God’s fiat, then for God himself there is no difference between right and wrong, and it is no longer a significant statement to say that God is good. If you are going to say, as theologians do, that God is good, you must then say that right and wrong have some meaning which is independent of God’s fiat, because God’s fiats are good and not bad independently of the mere fact that he made them. If you are going to say that, you will then have to say that it is not only through God that right and wrong came into being, but that they are in their essence logically anterior to God. You could, of course, if you liked, say that there was a superior deity who gave orders to the God that made this world, or could take up the line that some of the gnostics took up — a line which I often thought was a very plausible one — that as a matter of fact this world that we know was made by the devil at a moment when God was not looking. There is a good deal to be said for that, and I am not concerned to refute it.

The Argument for the Remedying of Injustice

Then there is another very curious form of moral argument, which is this: they say that the existence of God is required in order to bring justice into the world. In the part of this universe that we know there is great injustice, and often the good suffer, and often the wicked prosper, and one hardly knows which of those is the more annoying; but if you are going to have justice in the universe as a whole you have to suppose a future life to redress the balance of life here on earth. So they say that there must be a God, and there must be Heaven and Hell in order that in the long run there may be justice. That is a very curious argument. If you looked at the matter from a scientific point of view, you would say, “After all, I only know this world. I do not know about the rest of the universe, but so far as one can argue at all on probabilities one would say that probably this world is a fair sample, and if there is injustice here the odds are that there is injustice elsewhere also.” Supposing you got a crate of oranges that you opened, and you found all the top layer of oranges bad, you would not argue, “The underneath ones must be good, so as to redress the balance.” You would say, “Probably the whole lot is a bad consignment”; and that is really what a scientific person would argue about the universe. He would say, “Here we find in this world a great deal of injustice, and so far as that goes that is a reason for supposing that justice does not rule in the world; and therefore so far as it goes it affords a moral argument against deity and not in favor of one.” Of course I know that the sort of intellectual arguments that I have been talking to you about are not what really moves people. What really moves people to believe in God is not any intellectual argument at all. Most people believe in God because they have been taught from early infancy to do it, and that is the main reason.

Then I think that the next most powerful reason is the wish for safety, a sort of feeling that there is a big brother who will look after you. That plays a very profound part in influencing people’s desire for a belief in God.

The Character of Christ

I now want to say a few words upon a topic which I often think is not quite sufficiently dealt with by Rationalists, and that is the question whether Christ was the best and the wisest of men. It is generally taken for granted that we should all agree that that was so. I do not myself. I think that there are a good many points upon which I agree with Christ a great deal more than the professing Christians do. I do not know that I could go with Him all the way, but I could go with Him much further than most professing Christians can. You will remember that He said, “Resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.” That is not a new precept or a new principle. It was used by Lao-tse and Buddha some 500 or 600 years before Christ, but it is not a principle which as a matter of fact Christians accept. I have no doubt that the present prime minister [Stanley Baldwin], for instance, is a most sincere Christian, but I should not advise any of you to go and smite him on one cheek. I think you might find that he thought this text was intended in a figurative sense.

Then there is another point which I consider excellent. You will remember that Christ said, “Judge not lest ye be judged.” That principle I do not think you would find was popular in the law courts of Christian countries. I have known in my time quite a number of judges who were very earnest Christians, and none of them felt that they were acting contrary to Christian principles in what they did. Then Christ says, “Give to him that asketh of thee, and from him that would borrow of thee turn not thou away.” That is a very good principle. Your Chairman has reminded you that we are not here to talk politics, but I cannot help observing that the last general election was fought on the question of how desirable it was to turn away from him that would borrow of thee, so that one must assume that the Liberals and Conservatives of this country are composed of people who do not agree with the teaching of Christ, because they certainly did very emphatically turn away on that occasion.

Then there is one other maxim of Christ which I think has a great deal in it, but I do not find that it is very popular among some of our Christian friends. He says, “If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that which thou hast, and give to the poor.” That is a very excellent maxim, but, as I say, it is not much practised. All these, I think, are good maxims, although they are a little difficult to live up to. I do not profess to live up to them myself; but then, after all, it is not quite the same thing as for a Christian.

Defects in Christ’s Teaching

Having granted the excellence of these maxims, I come to certain points in which I do not believe that one can grant either the superlative wisdom or the superlative goodness of Christ as depicted in the Gospels; and here I may say that one is not concerned with the historical question. Historically it is quite doubtful whether Christ ever existed at all, and if He did we do not know anything about him, so that I am not concerned with the historical question, which is a very difficult one. I am concerned with Christ as He appears in the Gospels, taking the Gospel narrative as it stands, and there one does find some things that do not seem to be very wise. For one thing, he certainly thought that His second coming would occur in clouds of glory before the death of all the people who were living at that time. There are a great many texts that prove that. He says, for instance, “Ye shall not have gone over the cities of Israel till the Son of Man be come.” Then he says, “There are some standing here which shall not taste death till the Son of Man comes into His kingdom”; and there are a lot of places where it is quite clear that He believed that His second coming would happen during the lifetime of many then living. That was the belief of His earlier followers, and it was the basis of a good deal of His moral teaching. When He said, “Take no thought for the morrow,” and things of that sort, it was very largely because He thought that the second coming was going to be very soon, and that all ordinary mundane affairs did not count. I have, as a matter of fact, known some Christians who did believe that the second coming was imminent. I knew a parson who frightened his congregation terribly by telling them that the second coming was very imminent indeed, but they were much consoled when they found that he was planting trees in his garden. The early Christians did really believe it, and they did abstain from such things as planting trees in their gardens, because they did accept from Christ the belief that the second coming was imminent. In that respect, clearly He was not so wise as some other people have been, and He was certainly not superlatively wise.

The Moral Problem

Then you come to moral questions. There is one very serious defect to my mind in Christ’s moral character, and that is that He believed in hell. I do not myself feel that any person who is really profoundly humane can believe in everlasting punishment. Christ certainly as depicted in the Gospels did believe in everlasting punishment, and one does find repeatedly a vindictive fury against those people who would not listen to His preaching — an attitude which is not uncommon with preachers, but which does somewhat detract from superlative excellence. You do not, for instance find that attitude in Socrates. You find him quite bland and urbane toward the people who would not listen to him; and it is, to my mind, far more worthy of a sage to take that line than to take the line of indignation. You probably all remember the sorts of things that Socrates was saying when he was dying, and the sort of things that he generally did say to people who did not agree with him.

You will find that in the Gospels Christ said, “Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of Hell.” That was said to people who did not like His preaching. It is not really to my mind quite the best tone, and there are a great many of these things about Hell. There is, of course, the familiar text about the sin against the Holy Ghost: “Whosoever speaketh against the Holy Ghost it shall not be forgiven him neither in this World nor in the world to come.” That text has caused an unspeakable amount of misery in the world, for all sorts of people have imagined that they have committed the sin against the Holy Ghost, and thought that it would not be forgiven them either in this world or in the world to come. I really do not think that a person with a proper degree of kindliness in his nature would have put fears and terrors of that sort into the world.

Then Christ says, “The Son of Man shall send forth his His angels, and they shall gather out of His kingdom all things that offend, and them which do iniquity, and shall cast them into a furnace of fire; there shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth”; and He goes on about the wailing and gnashing of teeth. It comes in one verse after another, and it is quite manifest to the reader that there is a certain pleasure in contemplating wailing and gnashing of teeth, or else it would not occur so often. Then you all, of course, remember about the sheep and the goats; how at the second coming He is going to divide the sheep from the goats, and He is going to say to the goats, “Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire.” He continues, “And these shall go away into everlasting fire.” Then He says again, “If thy hand offend thee, cut it off; it is better for thee to enter into life maimed, than having two hands to go into Hell, into the fire that never shall be quenched; where the worm dieth not and the fire is not quenched.” He repeats that again and again also. I must say that I think all this doctrine, that hell-fire is a punishment for sin, is a doctrine of cruelty. It is a doctrine that put cruelty into the world and gave the world generations of cruel torture; and the Christ of the Gospels, if you could take Him asHis chroniclers represent Him, would certainly have to be considered partly responsible for that.

There are other things of less importance. There is the instance of the Gadarene swine, where it certainly was not very kind to the pigs to put the devils into them and make them rush down the hill into the sea. You must remember that He was omnipotent, and He could have made the devils simply go away; but He chose to send them into the pigs. Then there is the curious story of the fig tree, which always rather puzzled me. You remember what happened about the fig tree. “He was hungry; and seeing a fig tree afar off having leaves, He came if haply He might find anything thereon; and when He came to it He found nothing but leaves, for the time of figs was not yet. And Jesus answered and said unto it: ‘No man eat fruit of thee hereafter for ever’ . . . and Peter . . . saith unto Him: ‘Master, behold the fig tree which thou cursedst is withered away.’” This is a very curious story, because it was not the right time of year for figs, and you really could not blame the tree. I cannot myself feel that either in the matter of wisdom or in the matter of virtue Christ stands quite as high as some other people known to history. I think I should put Buddha and Socrates above Him in those respects.

The Emotional Factor

As I said before, I do not think that the real reason why people accept religion has anything to do with argumentation. They accept religion on emotional grounds. One is often told that it is a very wrong thing to attack religion, because religion makes men virtuous. So I am told; I have not noticed it. You know, of course, the parody of that argument in Samuel Butler’s book, Erewhon Revisited. You will remember that in Erewhon there is a certain Higgs who arrives in a remote country, and after spending some time there he escapes from that country in a balloon. Twenty years later he comes back to that country and finds a new religion in which he is worshiped under the name of the “Sun Child,” and it is said that he ascended into heaven. He finds that the Feast of the Ascension is about to be celebrated, and he hears Professors Hanky and Panky say to each other that they never set eyes on the man Higgs, and they hope they never will; but they are the high priests of the religion of the Sun Child. He is very indignant, and he comes up to them, and he says, “I am going to expose all this humbug and tell the people of Erewhon that it was only I, the man Higgs, and I went up in a balloon.” He was told, “You must not do that, because all the morals of this country are bound round this myth, and if they once know that you did not ascend into Heaven they will all become wicked”; and so he is persuaded of that and he goes quietly away.

That is the idea — that we should all be wicked if we did not hold to the Christian religion. It seems to me that the people who have held to it have been for the most part extremely wicked. You find this curious fact, that the more intense has been the religion of any period and the more profound has been the dogmatic belief, the greater has been the cruelty and the worse has been the state of affairs. In the so-called ages of faith, when men really did believe the Christian religion in all its completeness, there was the Inquisition, with all its tortures; there were millions of unfortunate women burned as witches; and there was every kind of cruelty practiced upon all sorts of people in the name of religion.

You find as you look around the world that every single bit of progress in humane feeling, every improvement in the criminal law, every step toward the diminution of war, every step toward better treatment of the colored races, or every mitigation of slavery, every moral progress that there has been in the world, has been consistently opposed by the organized churches of the world. I say quite deliberately that the Christian religion, as organized in its churches, has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world.

How the Churches Have Retarded Progress

You may think that I am going too far when I say that that is still so. I do not think that I am. Take one fact. You will bear with me if I mention it. It is not a pleasant fact, but the churches compel one to mention facts that are not pleasant. Supposing that in this world that we live in today an inexperienced girl is married to a syphilitic man; in that case the Catholic Church says, “This is an indissoluble sacrament. You must endure celibacy or stay together. And if you stay together, you must not use birth control to prevent the birth of syphilitic children.” Nobody whose natural sympathies have not been warped by dogma, or whose moral nature was not absolutely dead to all sense of suffering, could maintain that it is right and proper that that state of things should continue.

That is only an example. There are a great many ways in which, at the present moment, the church, by its insistence upon what it chooses to call morality, inflicts upon all sorts of people undeserved and unnecessary suffering. And of course, as we know, it is in its major part an opponent still of progress and improvement in all the ways that diminish suffering in the world, because it has chosen to label as morality a certain narrow set of rules of conduct which have nothing to do with human happiness; and when you say that this or that ought to be done because it would make for human happiness, they think that has nothing to do with the matter at all. “What has human happiness to do with morals? The object of morals is not to make people happy.”

Fear, the Foundation of Religion

Religion is based, I think, primarily and mainly upon fear. It is partly the terror of the unknown and partly, as I have said, the wish to feel that you have a kind of elder brother who will stand by you in all your troubles and disputes. Fear is the basis of the whole thing — fear of the mysterious, fear of defeat, fear of death. Fear is the parent of cruelty, and therefore it is no wonder if cruelty and religion have gone hand in hand. It is because fear is at the basis of those two things. In this world we can now begin a little to understand things, and a little to master them by help of science, which has forced its way step by step against the Christian religion, against the churches, and against the opposition of all the old precepts. Science can help us to get over this craven fear in which mankind has lived for so many generations. Science can teach us, and I think our own hearts can teach us, no longer to look around for imaginary supports, no longer to invent allies in the sky, but rather to look to our own efforts here below to make this world a better place to live in, instead of the sort of place that the churches in all these centuries have made it.

What We Must Do

We want to stand upon our own feet and look fair and square at the world — its good facts, its bad facts, its beauties, and its ugliness; see the world as it is and be not afraid of it. Conquer the world by intelligence and not merely by being slavishly subdued by the terror that comes from it. The whole conception of God is a conception derived from the ancient Oriental despotisms. It is a conception quite unworthy of free men. When you hear people in church debasing themselves and saying that they are miserable sinners, and all the rest of it, it seems contemptible and not worthy of self-respecting human beings. We ought to stand up and look the world frankly in the face. We ought to make the best we can of the world, and if it is not so good as we wish, after all it will still be better than what these others have made of it in all these ages. A good world needs knowledge, kindliness, and courage; it does not need a regretful hankering after the past or a fettering of the free intelligence by the words uttered long ago by ignorant men. It needs a fearless outlook and a free intelligence. It needs hope for the future, not looking back all the time toward a past that is dead, which we trust will be far surpassed by the future that our intelligence can create.

Stupid Things People Do: Having a National Day of Prayer

Idiot Nation

Stupidity has no bounds. In fact, it might be the only thing in the world that is so mind-blowingly without bounds that it has managed to surpass even greed. Case in point: believing in prayer and that it works.

A few weeks ago I reported that 25% of Americans believe that prayer is a proper form of health care and that over 75% believe that prayer can speed up the medical treatment of people.

According to a recent USA TODAY/Gallup Poll of 1,000 adults,  92% say there is a God and 83% say this God answers prayers.

I shit. you. not.

Today I finally find out why people are so massively stupid: it is because the government encourages it by having a National Day of Prayer. I thought that was a joke and that I was being spoofed, but there really exits a national day of prayer where people get together and pray to an imaginary, fictitious, supernatural being to fix things. The scary thing is that the majority of people really do believe this to be the right thing to do.

I don’t know if I should be angry or supremely insulted or just speechless because I really cannot believe that the government would create a day in commemoration of magic and gibberish essentially.

Having a national day of prayer is sort of like having a national Santa Clause Day where everyone tells Santa what they want and hopes it comes true come Christmas Day. It is absurd and nonsensical and I cannot believe an entire nation with otherwise rational human beings would fall for such kind of a mass delusion in unison.

In fact, it is kind of creepy.

I feel like one of those people who are dragged to a strange cult witnessing their equally strange rituals and being grateful that luckily the rest of the world isn’t like that. Only that in this Twilight Zone version of USA circa 2012, the rest of the nation is like that and I am one of the few normal ones left.

It is like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, only worse because it isn’t aliens that take have taken over but religion.

Instead of using our minds and with it reason and intellect to solve our problems, the whole nation is seriously turning to nothing more than magic and hocus pocus to accomplish it. It is a cult. A disgustingly ignorant and dangerous cult populated by mindless sheep and automatons incapable of a shred of independent thought.

No wonder this country is going down the tubes. The majority of the population genuinely believes that prayer, which is  ”an address to God or a supernatural power in word or thought“  is the solution to our problems as not only a country but human kind in general. That is some fucked up shit. It is like watching the whole world succumbing to a terrible illness and mass hysteria and you can’t do anything about it.