Words Like Locusts Flew From Her Fingers

Torture Doesn’t Work

A tortured stance on torture – The Boston Globe
The trouble with torture is that a prisoner will say anything he thinks you may want to hear.

This has been demonstrated many times over in studies of torture victims from all over the world. People will do pretty much anything to get the torture to stop.

Just for the sake of argument, let’s say our president and his cadre of advisors are completely immoral and don’t care that torturing people is wrong. Even putting aside the whole moral argument, torture is a dumb thing to do. It doesn’t glean reliable information. You spend too much time and money separating the “true” confessions from the “false” confessions. When you torture their guys, it makes the enemy especially angry and even more likely to do terrible things to your own guys. It makes other people — who otherwise wouldn’t have cared much one way or another — more likely to be supportive of the enemy because they find torture to be so objectionable.

So, you see. Even if it weren’t grossly immoral, torture is just plain stupid.

Yes, yes… Bush keeps saying “We don’t torture!” but get real, people. Bush is a fucking liar. Either that or he’s too damned stupid to understand that waterboarding IS TORTURE.

Stupid and immoral. That’s our Bush. His parents must be so proud.

Well, I’ve gone off on a small tirade — part of the reason I’m not blogging as much lately, too many tirades that all say pretty much the same thing. It’s really worth your while to read the entire Boston Globe editorial I quoted a bit from up top there. H.D.S. Greenway says it all much better than I have.

It’s Never A Good Idea To Hire Mercenaries

Iraqi Probe Faults Blackwater Guards – washingtonpost.com
An Iraqi government investigation into the Sept. 16 shooting involving Blackwater USA has concluded that the security firm’s guards fired without provocation into a Baghdad square, killing 17 and injuring 27, a government spokesman said Sunday.

The Blackwater people get all huffy when you call them mercenaries but, of course, that’s exactly what they are. It’s not at all surprising that there have been these kinds of problems with the mercenaries. They don’t have the same kind of structure and regulations that (when they’re working correctly) prevent military people from getting into this kind of trouble.

Does Religion Make People Do Evil?

Richard Dawkins: OnFaith on washingtonpost.com
Nobody is suggesting that all religious people are violent, intolerant, racist, bigoted, contemptuous of women and so on. It would be absurd to suggest such a thing: just as absurd as to generalize about all atheists. I am not even concerned with statistical generalizations about the majority of religious people (or atheists). My concern here is over whether there is any general reason why religion might be more or less likely to bias individuals towards all those unpleasant things in Christopher Hitchens’s list: to make them more likely to exhibit them than they would have been without religion. I think the answer is yes.

You know, Richard Dawkins is an intelligent guy. Really, he is — I have no doubt about that. But when I read stuff like his latest here, I have to assume that he’s letting his dislike of religion cloud his ability to reason.

He argues (in this Washington Post editorial) that there is a “logical path” from religious belief to evil deeds — and as his evidence he cites examples of bad people who were also religious.

What he doesn’t apparently take into consideration is that, throughout recorded human history, the vast majority of all people have been religious in one way or another. It only goes to figure that most of the bad ones (as well as most of the good ones) would have been people with religious beliefs.

At the end of his piece, Dawkins quotes Steven Weinberg, “With or without [religion] you’d have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, it takes religion.” It’s a cute way of putting things — and it’s definitely ‘quotable’ — but if you really think about it, Weinberg only had it half right. Good people do good things and might say their religion had something to do with it. Bad people do bad things and, likewise, might invoke religious belief as an explanation. But good people don’t do bad things. BAD people do bad things. For every religiously-inspired bomber, there’s a Dorothy Day. The bombers just get more press.

Religion doesn’t make people bad, it just provides a justification for it. Remarkably, it can also provide a justification for being kind and loving. Most of all, religion is a really fascinating example of how human beings look for “meaning” in their lives. It’s absurd, though, to grant as much power to religion as Richard Dawkins does. Religion is a reflection of human desires — not the source.