Vineet,

Yes I also noted that Bernie never gives a traditional religious answer to a question.  He is very good at citing positive values whenever someone starts to talk about religion.  I decided to give a small donation to his campaign just to add to the count of contributors that he can report.  I expect that Bernie will somewhat rapidly get to three million contributors.

From your linked article, “To me, it means that all of us are connected, all of life is connected, and that we are all tied together.”  And ".. what I believe in, and what my spirituality is about, is that we’re all in this together.”

If this be religion you can count me in.  I am still going to call myself a rather hard atheist, but Bernie has a perspective that works for me.

It is hard for me to see how this election cycle is going to play out.  It seems as if there is a near zero chance that the GOP will nominate anyone who is not a complete fascist lunatic.  Heck, Nixon would be a liberal extremist by modern Republican standards.  Trump is now calling Cruz a jerk.  I saw one commentator who thought this was hilarious.  Nate Silver says, "Trump, who has a net favorable rating of -25 percentage points among general election voters, would begin the race as perhaps the most unpopular major-party nominee ever."  However, with hundreds of millions to be spent slandering whoever the Democrats nominate, there is no guarantee that Hillary or Bernie will end up with a more positive average image.  Plutocracy maintains its power because "money is speech."  And we have no guarantee that the rest of the American people will be able to see beyond the illusions that money can put in front of us.

Don

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Subject: Re: [atheists-27] AHA, Reason Rally, Etc
From: [address removed]
To: [address removed]
Date: Wed, 27 Jan[masked]:55:21 -0500

You're right, Don. The intellect helps see what's real - that the US is a plutocracy - but music like this gives hope. And maybe there is hope! I just read that Bernie Sanders doesn't participate in organized religion. Glad to know that he doesn't bother pretending to be christian like Clinton.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/bernie-sanders-finally-answers-the-god-question/2016/01/26/83429390-bfb0-11e5-bcda-62a36b394160_story.html?hpid=hp_rhp-top-table-main_sanders-religion-1050am%3Ahomepage%2Fstory

On Wed, Jan 27, 2016 at 10:46 AM, Don Wharton <[address removed]> wrote:

Hi Vineet,

Thanks for the link. Cohen has an extraordinary poetic sensibility. It has been a while since I listened to him. He does touch on the disenfranchised, such as the homeless and the gays. I did very much like this stanza:

Sail on, sail on

O mighty Ship of State!

To the Shores of Need

Past the Reefs of Greed

Through the Squalls of Hate

Sail on, sail on, sail on, sail on.

While the poetry echoes deeply with my sensibility as it does with yours, I strongly prefer the use of the intellect to understand what is real. However, the intellect seems to be supremely ineffective in a very important way. There is a zero chance that anything that I write will have over a million views. One of the Leonard Cohen videos had over 4 million views. Our collective attention does go toward that which grabs our emotions. Some may appreciate the full text of the words of this song below.

Don

"Democracy"

It's coming through a hole in the air,

from those nights in Tiananmen Square.

It's coming from the feel

that this ain't exactly real,

or it's real, but it ain't exactly there.

From the wars against disorder,

from the sirens night and day,

from the fires of the homeless,

from the ashes of the gay:

Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.

It's coming through a crack in the wall;

on a visionary flood of alcohol;

from the staggering account

of the Sermon on the Mount

which I don't pretend to understand at all.

It's coming from the silence

on the dock of the bay,

from the brave, the bold, the battered

heart of Chevrolet:

Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.

It's coming from the sorrow in the street,

the holy places where the races meet;

from the homicidal bitchin'

that goes down in every kitchen

to determine who will serve and who will eat.

From the wells of disappointment

where the women kneel to pray

for the grace of God in the desert here

and the desert far away:

Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.

Sail on, sail on

O mighty Ship of State!

To the Shores of Need

Past the Reefs of Greed

Through the Squalls of Hate

Sail on, sail on, sail on, sail on.

It's coming to America first,

the cradle of the best and of the worst.

It's here they got the range

and the machinery for change

and it's here they got the spiritual thirst.

It's here the family's broken

and it's here the lonely say

that the heart has got to open

in a fundamental way:

Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.

It's coming from the women and the men.

O baby, we'll be making love again.

We'll be going down so deep

the river's going to weep,

and the mountain's going to shout Amen!

It's coming like the tidal flood

beneath the lunar sway,

imperial, mysterious,

in amorous array:

Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.

Sail on, sail on ...

I'm sentimental, if you know what I mean

I love the country but I can't stand the scene.

And I'm neither left or right

I'm just staying home tonight,

getting lost in that hopeless little screen.

But I'm stubborn as those garbage bags

that Time cannot decay,

I'm junk but I'm still holding up

this little wild bouquet:

Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.

---

Subject: Re: [atheists-27] AHA, Reason Rally, Etc
From: [address removed]
To: [address removed]
Date: Tue, 26 Jan[masked]:06:00 -0500

The rise of the likes of Trump and Cruz just makes me lose my faith in humanity, but when I start feeling like that, I listen to "Democracy" by Leonard Cohen, a song that brilliantly describes the political scene in the US.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DU-RuR-qO4Y

Vineet

On Tue, Jan 26, 2016 at 7:48 PM, Don Wharton <[address removed]> wrote:

Hi All,

I have not been posting anything recently on our elist. Let me share a couple of relevant things that I have done. WASH is considering becoming a full chapter of AHA (the American Humanist Association). I love what the AHA is doing and I fully support the move. I have written an article for the WASH newsletter detailing my reasons for supporting the move. We will see if our editor views it as being worthy of publishing.  I will share my detailed thoughts on that here after it is published, or perhaps not published.

You all probably know that there will be a 2016 Reason Rally on June 4. I was in charge of our volunteer staff supporting the merchandising operation on the Mall the last time. There is new leadership for the current effort and I was asked to review the problems that occurred with the prior effort. Of course, much of that went quite right and I included that also in my report. I think many among the small army we had supporting that prior effort would like to similarly support our cause again. Perhaps that will happen. I am delighted to be in touch with the leadership working on our new national scale secular gathering.

I have been doing a lot of listening to political presentations on CSPAN radio. There were a great many outrageously false claims made such as, “You all know that all of your rights come from God.” I think that one was by Marco Rubio. I found not one single sentence in his town hall forum that made any sense at all. For me this had become typical for all leading GOP candidates. The GOP candidates that are slightly reasonable, such as Jeb! nnd Kasich, don't have the slightest chance of getting their party's nomination. And those two are still full blown lunatics by my standards.

I have found a very good science article on the neurobiology of values that explains much of the above:

http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/367/1589/754

The price of your soul: neural evidence for the non-utilitarian representation of sacred values

We really need to do a more detailed look at how and why much of our society seems to have lost all reasonable connection with reality.

I noticed that WETA is broadcasting (tonight on 26-2 at 10pm) a series titled Afterlife. This seems dedicated to religiously related nonsense. Example from the website:

“Robert Bridge is a psychology lecturer, grieving the loss of his young son. A specialist in the study of psychic mediums, Robert is invited to an ‘evening of clairvoyance’ where he meets Alison Mundy. Alison is reluctant and troubled, she is a far cry from the fraudulent psychics that Robert is used to. This gripping series combines genuine scares with emotional and compelling weekly stories.”

Oh yeah, Alison isn't one of those “fraudulent psychics.” LOL.

Don

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