Religion-Go-Round

In the name of Christ, I refuse to be anti-gay. I refuse to be anti-feminist. I refuse to be anti-artificial birth control. In the name of ... Christ, I quit Christianity and being Christian. Amen.
Anne Rice

This somewhat overwrought declaration isn't entirely correct, as it seems that the author is still a believer, but she has decided that she can't remain in the Roman Catholic Church in good conscience. There seems to be a lot of movement between different faiths, denominations and between being religious and being not. According to a Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life survey from 2009, approximately half of the adults in the United States have changed religious affiliation at least once in their lives (although their overall sample size may be a bit small for that sweeping a claim). And Anne Rice is part of the general exodus away from Catholicism, which seems to losing members at nearly four time the rate it gains them. Like many of the ex-Catholics in the Pew survey, she realized (decided?) that she simply couldn't maintain a belief in the church's teachings.

The constant movement between faiths in the United States is interesting, if for no other reason than it demonstrates the continuing deterioration of "brand loyalty" to institutions in general. The overall consensus seems to be: "I know what I need, and I don't necessarily need you to help me get it." This could be bad news for churches, as well as other institutions whose primary currency is the size of their membership roster. But perhaps it is a call to change the way things are done. When I was a child, it was simply assumed that you went to a church with your parents, you dutifully listened to what the men at the pulpits had to say and you believed it. Asking questions, especially if you were persistent about it, wouldn't exactly get you into trouble, but it wasn't a recipe for being well-liked in religious circles (at least, until you were old enough that someone could try to recruit you without sparking controversy). The issue is, that low-level hostility to questions didn't make the questions go away - it just locked them in the closet until they could pick the lock.

I know a number of people from broadly divergent religious backgrounds, and they one thing they all have in common seems to be a basic inability to present their religion in such a way that it makes logical sense to someone who doesn't already believe it. Perhaps once that changes, the religious landscape will seem a little more firm.

The Great Debate

Costco, the box-box retailer, has its own "lifestyle" magazine, The Costco Connection. One of the recurring features is "Informed Debate," where a yes-or-no question is asked, a couple of experts weigh in, and various Costco members offer their "man on the street" perspectives. There is then a survey form for readers to vote for a side, and offer comments, some of which are published in the next issue of the magazine.

July's debate question was: "Should it be harder to filibuster?" Perhaps predictably, the "expert" for the Yes side was Senator Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) and the No side was represented by Senator Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina). (One wonders if they would have been on different sides four years ago.) This was, in a way, too bad. It gave the question an air of direct partisanship that might have been avoided. The comments from others seemed similarly partisan, but with a twist on the No side - the idea that the system had been deliberately set up this way. One of the member on the street answers was:

Our forefathers got things right the first time, and we shouldn't be tinkering with a system that isn't broken.

Perhaps more direct was a writer in the August issue:

NO. The original framers of the Constitution got it right in the first place. Leave it the way they wrote it.

Sounds reasonable. Only one small problem. "[...]the Constitution does not contemplate the filibuster in any way, directly or indirectly."

Well. So much for "Informed Debate." Although I suppose it's simply an unfortunate side effect of the fact that so many of us get our information secondhand from sources that we trust and that often, we chose whether or not to trust a source on the basis of its agreement with what we already believe or wish to believe. And this is a difficult problem to get around. Not all of us have the time or the inclination to be Constitutional scholars and when you don't know yourself, you have to trust someone.

It seems that the cure for such things is a greater emphasis on and respect for doing the research. But I don't know how you get there. It's easy to say that we should have more respect for knowing what one is talking about, but that's likely to lead us back into an echo chamber, where people praise each other for agreeing with them. And people are often unwilling to credit as truly independent someone who doesn't share their view. And what do you do in a situation where the facts are in dispute or the topic is subjective? (Although in this case, the editors at The Costco Connection could have made clear that the filibuster is not a constitutional issue, but merely a rule of the Senate.)

This is going to be a solution a long time in coming.

A Little Birdy Told Me

Okay. Here's a question. If you refuse to know who has provided you with a particular piece of information, how can you know that the information is accurate?

I understand the Wikileaks position - by taking steps to ensure that they can never definitively know who leaked something to them, they work to ensure that they cannot be forced to reveal that information. It's the ultimate in anonymous sourcing.

But it's not a new concept that just because a source is anonymous (ooooo... mystery...) and is telling you something that is really juicy, that doesn't mean that the information is accurate. And this, I think might be Wikileaks downfall in the end. Someone is going to get to their credibility by providing a "smoking gun" that seems like a real game-changer - and turns out to be completely fabricated. Now, I'm sure that in such a case, Julian Assange and company will be quick to use the "I was snookered/I'm the victim here" defenses that we've seen come out of the Sherrod case. The problem is that those excuses will likely not work any better for Wikileaks than they did for the NAACP and Andrew Breitbart; that is, anyone not already firmly in their camp is likely to see it as more self-serving than genuinely exculpatory.

But this also exposes a potential flaw in the way the Obama administration has reacted to the story, one that not everyone can be counted on to replicate. If a document cannot be authenticated, why treat it as if it is genuine? Of course, in this case, critics of administration policies are going to be quick to use the documents as ammunition, and they are unlikely to wait for the whole story to come out (see: Shirley Sherrod) - but that doesn't mean that it's wise to automatically treat everything as being on the up-and-up (noticing a pattern here...).

Howl

Memo to the Administration and the NAACP

I learned this the hard way, back when I was in my twenties. It's plain from current news coverage that you haven't learned it, so please allow me to share it with you.

Any piece of information presented to you by someone who you know has a reason to deceive you should never be taken at face value or acted upon prior to be verified - regardless of how much you either want to believe it or fear that it may be true.