Unease and Discomfort

First, I’ll start with the easiest thoughts on my mind: sometimes an atheist is asked “what would make you believe”. Here are some ideas:

This kind of shows just how weak the claims of Christianity are, doesn’t it? Of course, the claims of the other religions are just as weak if not weaker; after all the story of Moses, Joseph Smith and Mohamed don’t impress me either.

Discomfort and Unease
Fictional

This is the trailer for the film The Reader. Don’t give up on the film too early; it gets better and even more disturbing. It is especially disturbing stuff given what our country is going though at the moment.

Real Life
Affirmative Action and Fairness

I don’t see a good solution to the current case involving fire fighters and racial discrimination:

The U.S. Supreme Court will consider later this month when the government can use race as a factor in its hiring and promotion decisions.

The reverse discrimination suit, Ricci v. DeStefano, was filed by white firefighters in New Haven, Conn., who passed a promotional exam, only to have the results thrown out because no blacks got top scores, the Christian Science Monitor reports. The plaintiffs claim violation of constitutional equal protection guarantees and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, according to the Los Angeles Times.

The case is scheduled for argument on April 22. It will give the Supreme Court under the leadership of Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. an opportunity to issue its first major decision on racial discrimination in employment, the New York Times reports.

The Los Angeles Times says the court’s decision could change hiring and promotion policies for public employees—and possibly for private workers.

In a 2007 case involving education, Roberts wrote the majority opinion holding that public schools improperly used race to decide school assignments. “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race,” Roberts wrote.

The Obama administration filed a brief supporting New Haven, saying the city could throw out the test results if they had “gross exclusionary effects on minorities,” according to the Los Angeles Times. About 37 percent of New Haven’s population is black, according to 2000 censure figures. But 32 percent of the city’s entry-level firefighters are black and 15 percent of supervisory firefighters are black, according to 2007 figures.

In a nutshell what happened is that Blacks did poorly on the standardized tests and hence the results were thrown out. On the surface this seems ridiculous and in some settings, it would be.

For example: were these, say, masters degree examinations in mathematics, what counts is one’s knowledge of mathematics and that can be reliably tested via a written examination.

But in this case, we are talking about firefighting, and I don’t know enough about firefighting to know if a written exam is what you need to use.

Sure, the reasons for the exams are evident enough: mostly exams are used to put some subjectivity into the process. But evidently what exams are really measuring might be more about literacy than anything else, and is literacy really a fighter fighting skill? I don’t know.

Besides, literacy IS something that can be improved upon by a less racist society; studies have shown that one’s abilities to master written material is, in large part, determined by one’s early upbringing.

Let me be clear about this: as a citizen, I want competent fire fighters. But are written exams the best way to measure such competence (in this field)??? I don’t know.

I don’t have a good answer here; this is one of those cases in which I can see many sides of an issue.

Discomfort and Unease: US and torture.

Let’s face facts: as a country, we tortured people. The sorry facts are laid out here. Thank you, President Obama, for shining some sunlight on this.

So what are we going to do about it? Some are calling for us to impeach a Federal Judge who gave the Bush administration legal cover to torture. I’ll have to think about whether this is a good idea or not. On one hand, this sure sounds like we are sacrificing someone. On the other hand, the judge did what we said he did and he doesn’t belong on the bench; I sure don’t want him there.

But the reality is that the real people who should be brought to justice are: President Bush and Vice President Cheney. But doing that would be next to impossible; there is a reason that leaders are brought to justice only after the said country has been defeated in a war or if a long, long time had elapsed.

But the reality is that there are just too many people in the country who approve of what Bush-Cheney did. Going after those two would use every resource that we have and ultimately end up being unsuccessful.

Yes, I know, the Repukes impeached President Clinton over a lie about oral sex. But the country was better during that time, and that fiasco didn’t really help anything, did it? And besides, President Clinton was still in office; President Bush is not.

But one thing is for sure: we don’t have lots of moral high ground to stand on, do we? We are better than many but, on moral grounds, we aren’t really as superior as we’d like to think. Oh, the wingnuts will argue; after all they measure superiority by which religious fairy tale that one embraces.

I am disgusted but I really don’t see what we can or should do now, and I certainly don’t fault President Obama for being stuck in this rather tight box.

Personally, I’d like to see Congress run with this and do something, though I don’t have a clear idea as to exactly what should be done. And whatever we do can’t be a partisan operation and, to be frank, I see the Republicans as being morally bankrupt.

More unease and utter disgust

Yes, some societies still burn people alive for being “witches”.

This video is very, very disturbing.

Yes, this practice was condoned in the Bible.

Fear plus superstition equals horrific crimes.

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