“I Can’t Breathe”

“I Can’t Breathe”      May 31, 2020  Dr. Roger Ray, pastor

click here to see the video

p. 181 “Black and Blue: Exploring Racial Bias and Law Enforcement in the Killings of unarmed Black Male Civilians” American Psychologist 2016

With the Department of Justice’s indictment of the Ferguson Police Department for racially biased policing (United States Department of Justice, 2015), as well as their probe into the death of Freddie Gray in Baltimore (Verhovek, 2015), there is increased public impetus for police reform. We agree that institutional reform is critical. However, since racial bias neither begins nor ends with police, calls for change must extend beyond police organizations.

Thus, we apply principles of both social and industrial and organizational (I/O) psychology to offer suggestions for society and joint police-community partnering. Then, we offer recommendations for law enforcement to better enable those partnerships and support systemic reform.

Amy Cooper picked a bad week and the wrong victim to trot out her white privilege this week. Christian Cooper is an avid birder and he was out in the fairly wild bramble of New York’s Central Park watching for birds. Signs in the area tell dog walkers that their dog must be on a leash, but Amy had let hers go, and her dog was scaring away birds and bothering Christian. He asked her politely to leash her dog, but she refused. 

When Christian insisted, she played a card that black men have seen far too often. She called on her white privilege, especially the privilege of a white woman, and she called the police and accused Christian of threatening her and her dog. She demanded that the cops come immediately and make him stop.

“I do declare, there is a black man here and he is scaring me!” Amy picked the wrong victim this time. 

Christian, not that it should matter, is a Harvard educated professional, and he just wasn’t going to fall for this old ploy. He recorded her racist attempt to assert her privilege and posted it online where, in the week when George Floyd was brutally murdered by four Minneapolis police, the video went viral. Even Christian feels that the public response to Amy’s racist phone call has been too much. Her employer fired her rather than suffer association with her. Her employment and probably her safety in New York are over. So, I don’t want to just pile on. It is easy to hate someone like Amy Cooper, especially this week.

She is not personally responsible for the racism that led to the police killing of George Floyd, Ahmaud Aubrey, Atatiana Johnson, or Philando Castile, but she is representative of it because her response to her sudden infamy is almost as familiar as the last words of George Floyd and Eric Garner, both of whom uttered the unforgettable last words, “I can’t breathe.” 

When Amy’s name became known she released a public apology that included this familiar phrase, “I’m not a racist.” “I’m deeply sorry, but I am not a racist.” She told the police that he was threatening her life but the next day she insisted, “I didn’t want anything bad to happen to him?” Because, what bad things could possibly happen to a black man in the park when a woman claims that he is threatening her life? 

Last year, police shot and killed 1,099 people in America. That is not counting victims like George Floyd and Eric Garner who were not shot, they were choked to death. In all of last year, there were only 27 days when the police did not shoot and kill at least one person. And, as you already know, a black man is 3x more likely to be shot than a white man. And it isn’t just a deep south issue. A black man is 6x more likely to be shot by the police in Oklahoma City than they are in Georgia. I have been in Oklahoma City several times and I can’t remember even seeing a black man in Oklahoma City! 

When you run the numbers, there is not a direct relationship between the size of the black population and police shootings of black men, there is not a direct relationship between the crime rates or gang related incidents in a city and the frequency of police shootings. The truth about race in America is complicated but, for the most part, it isn’t what you think it is. 

Again, I don’t want to just flog Amy Cooper in public because she is an easy target, what I do what to say to all of my white friends and listeners is that there is an Amy Cooper lurking inside of all of us. I am a white guy from rural Kentucky raised by gun toting, uneducated, children of the south. That doesn’t mean that I have a Phd in racism, in fact, the opposite, I know about racism the same way a fish knows about water . . . we are a part of the culture and the culture is a part of us. I knew when I heard what Amy Cooper did that she was being an unreflective, stupid, white privileged racist… I spotted it in a second.

And what’s more, when I heard Joe Biden telling Charlemagne that if he was undecided about how he was going to vote in November that “You ain’t black,” my stomach hit the floor. Joe Biden is a two-legged gaff machine but for an old white guy, under any circumstances, to say that if a black man doesn’t agree with what we want black men to think that they are not really black . . . that is not a gaff, that is political suicide. But it is hard for a fish to be aware of water and it is hard for Joe Biden, for Amy Cooper, for Roger Ray, David Ketchum, Sean Spyres or any of you white folks here or watching us on line to be aware of your white privilege and how often you consciously or unconsciously use it. 

Amy Cooper says that she is not really a racist, but we all know that, no, really, she totally is. And Joe Biden would insist that he isn’t, but these gaffs don’t come out of thin air . . . he is not nearly as much of a racist as Donald Trump but that is not the issue, Joe Biden has lingering white privilege all over him. I am not going to say that I am not a racist . . . I can say that I have spent my life trying to rid myself of my heritage but I am not going to claim to have achieved that goal because someone here would point out some time when I have recently enjoyed a bit of white privilege, even if it is just being able to walk around the square without being heckled by a bunch of white kids in a pickup truck, yelling racial slurs at me.

But more likely, when I get pulled over by the police for speeding, and I’m not saying that has happened, more than six or seven times, . . . that I have never been given a ticket. Because, I don’t have to say to the police officer, “Hey, I’m white, how about we just chat about this and I’ll promise to slow down and don’t write me a ticket?” He can see . . . 

remember David, when we got pulled over and the police took a long time checking the license tag and looking us over before telling us to have a nice day and to be more careful? Does that happen to black people in Springfield? White people don’t have to ask for privilege at the bank, in the court room, or even when we are protesting in public places, we just get it. And I’m a socialist!

Sure, we’re talking about this today because George Floyd was brutally choked to death by policemen in Minneapolis this week. I want justice for George Floyd and for his family, the justice that Philando Castile’s family didn’t get. Like all of you, I want to see the police involved charged with murder and taken to trial. I want them to receive a fair trial . . . not a white man’s trial, I want them to receive a fair trial and a just sentencing if they are found guilty. But what I don’t want to do is to rant and bluster about this injustice and be guilty of losing the context of it all. 

While we never want to lose the value of any unique human life that is unjustly taken, we don’t want to just have a series of angry outbursts that don’t go anywhere and don’t accomplish anything. It is about George Floyd but you can’t pull his death away from its connection to the recent shooting of Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia,  

and you can’t help associate his choking death with the death of Eric Garner, 

And Missouri’s own Michael Brown. Each has their own story, each one leaves behind a grief-stricken family but, and this is as much my fault as anyone’s, we get mad, we get sad, we make demands, and then we just go back to living our lives.

 Minneapolis is on fire this week, sure, because of George Floyd, but not just because of George Floyd. I don’t know much about Minneapolis but I know they have been in the news for police killing of unarmed black men several times in recent years. About 20% of the city is black, but if you have watched any news coverage of the protests, the majority of protestors are white because the city’s heritage of police violence against black men is no secret. Most white people want racism to stop, they want the police killings of unarmed black men to stop. But beyond expressing public rage in the immediate aftermath, what can be done?

I propose 2 foci: first we need to consider what can be done immediately to make things better and secondly, we need to look into the roots of racism and figure out how to get rid of it forever. 

Please forgive me if this seems rather prescriptive but the topic is too important for me to be misunderstood. I believe that we need to immediately reform policing but not policing alone. As I have been saying for years, our justice system is broken. Police who shoot and kill unarmed black men are rarely even charged with crimes and when they are, they seem to magically be acquitted or found to be innocent in spite of the whole world seeing the video of an obvious murder. This two-tiered justice system is primeval and must be reformed. 

And, there is no place as racially charged as our jails and prisons where prison staff are often just as racist as the racially defined gangs they are trying to manage in incarceration. I think that we need to reform all three dimensions of this cultural problem simultaneously and immediately.

How do we do it? Well, here is some good news. There are best practices that are field tested and that we already know will work to reduce race related crime while we work on writing a memorial service for racism generally.

From Ferguson to Minneapolis and all points in between, we see that white men are way overrepresented in law enforcement, the judiciary, and the penal system. We need to intentionally and specifically create a staff in all three levels that is reflective of the culture in which they exist. Recruiting needs to include background and psychological testing to weed out racists and people who have extreme needs for authority and respect. 

Secondly, we need to defuse the whole “them and us” mentality among police in cruisers and people on the streets. We need cops on sidewalks, interacting with business owners and neighbors. There needs to be a lot more facial recognition that isn’t based on a computer program. 

The research literature indicates that the worst of these racially influenced murders take place when white men are assigned to teams together. When a man is paired with a woman or when whites and people of color are put into teams together, they are much less likely to do something like what happened in Minneapolis this week when a white policeman knelt on a black man’s neck for five minutes while he slowly suffocated. I believe that if there had been a black officer there or a woman of any race, I believe that George Floyd would be alive today.

And, fourthly, cultural awareness needs to be taught constantly. We have made progress by including programing on TV that subtly exposes straight people to gay people, sys-gender people to trans folk, and white people to black people. But, and I have to admit that one of my white privilege failings has been that I have paid relatively little attention in my writing to black history month or gay pride month, but we need to be cross-pollenating our minds with the cultures of those around us 12 months out of the year. 

What if every police force, judicial staff, and prison staff in America had to read three of Toni Morrison’s novels in the next year? Maybe everyone can’t really learn what they need to know in a sociology class but just read a fiction novel written by someone who articulates the black experience in such a profound way that you will have to go look into a mirror to be sure that you are not a young black woman in rural Georgia. If there were any way to reliably prove it, I would bet you a $1000 right now that Amy Cooper has never read a Toni Morrison novel because, if she had, what she said to that 911 dispatcher would have stuck in her throat. 

These four proposals are not original to me. This is what I have found in the professional literature, but I have one more thing I want to talk about. I have talked about this before and I have not found it in the literature, I just know that I am right. I am going to conclude with this point, not because I am finished but because I have to stop somewhere. We will have more sermons on this channel this summer on how to root racism out of our society but for now, 

I want to talk about the thin blue line that says that law enforcement officers always have the back of every other law enforcement officer. I get it. The job is sometimes dangerous. Cops can’t confidently face the dangers they try to mitigate in the streets if they can’t trust their peers to have their back.

I had a brief stint years ago as a reporter on a military base. I have felt the camaraderie among the ranks. I know how deep and how powerful that sense of brotherhood is. But, guys, don’t you wonder if anyone on the Minneapolis police force was surprised on Friday that Derek Chauvin was arrested and charged with 3^rd degree murder.

In fact, if we had taken a confidential poll among law enforcement officers last week, asking them to guess which member of their force would eventually be charged with murdering a black man, I bet his name would have come up pretty often. 

Most people who choose to go into policing have a high need for order and most typically a personal desire for power and recognition. When you combine that with a latent sense of racial superiority, then this crap happens. 

I believe in everything that I said earlier about diversifying the force, humanizing policing, mixing police partners by race and gender, and including cultural sensitivity training. But, come on, we could cut down the number of unarmed black men killed by white cops this week if the so called “good cops” would stop covering for the bad cops and report them. And, guys, what makes you deserve to be respected and looked up to, what on earth qualifies you to be thought of as being a “good cop” if you are covering for, if you are protecting, if you are, in every literal sense, an ally with violent, racist, stupid, unhinged monsters who masquerade as people who have pledged to serve and protect the vulnerable on the streets?

Who knew that it would come to this with Derek Chauvin and didn’t report him deserves their shield today? 

Come on cops, look at this headline from the Los Angeles Times:  Getting killed by police is a leading cause of death for young black men in America. You are doing this! You are murdering black American citizens and you are hiding the people who are going to pull the trigger this week and I’m asking you to be a man and put a stop to it. 

I love my friends who are loyal and supportive but when I am in the wrong, my friends need to be the ones to tell me first, not the ones who lie for me and cover my tracks. When you silently listen to racist remarks, you are emboldening racism. When you laugh at racist jokes, you are setting up some black young man to be treated as if he were subhuman. 

And, when you let that openly racist cop three lockers down from you to put on a badge and strap on a weapon and then head out to the streets then you are nothing but the dog feces on sole of the shoes of our society. You are better than this. If you want us to buy this “protect and serve” line then you need to show us some integrity. If every law enforcement agency doesn’t do a deep dive review of their staff and cull at least 10% of their force then we know that they are not taking this issue seriously yet. 

I’m not saying that rioters should have burned down the 3^rdprecinct police headquarters in Minneapolis, I’m just saying that all you morally equivocating cops who didn’t report Derek Chauvin know why it happened and you know that you had it coming. 

There are a lot of things that scholars, psychologists, sociologists, and criminologists have to say about how to change the system to make it better. But I want to be clear about this, nothing gets the individual cop off of the hook for not reporting the racists in your midst. You know who they are, and you need to do your part to protect and serve the people. 

“The Debt We Owe to the Truth”

“The Debt We Owe to the Truth”  May 24, 2020   Dr. Roger Ray

click here to see the video  

“Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth. Sooner or later that debt is paid.”

https://feld.com/archives/2019/06/every-lie-we-tell-incurs-a-debt-to-the-truth.html

At my age it often pains me to call someone as young as this a “scientist” but it is true. Rebekah Jones single-handedly created two applications in two languages, four dashboards, six unique maps with layers of data functionality for 32 variables covering a half a million lines of data. Her objective was to create a way for Floridians and researchers to see what the COVID-19 situation was in real time. In spite of her remarkable intellect and accomplishments, she was fired by the Florida Department of Health earlier this month for refusing to manipulate the data on her program to scale back the numbers of virus infections in the state of Florida. She had put in 16 hour days for two months to accurately inform Floridians and tourists of the potentially life threatening virus and she refused to turn her program into a tool for propaganda. I don’t know what the future holds for Rebekah Jones and I don’t get to vote in Florida, but it would appear that the Governor’s position is wide open. 

Scientists are not always right, in fact, they are forever changing their body of knowledge in light of new information. No one would want to take any science course with even a 10-year-old textbook. A good scientist is always a stickler for the truth as best as the truth can be known, which is a deep commitment to honesty. 

Propaganda is not always dishonest. When Florida’s tourism department talks about beautiful white sand beaches, orange and grapefruit groves, amusement parks, and water sports, they are not lying, they are just accentuating the positive. When they don’t want you to talk about high hotel taxes and sneaky “spa” charges automatically added to your bill, or about which cities are increasing their numbers of Covid-19 cases, well, that becomes dishonest propaganda. So, in this case, let’s not call it propaganda, let’s call it what it is: a lie. The state of Florida wanted to lie to residents and tourists about how serious this virus is in their state. 

Florida does not have a state income tax. They have shifted their tax burden onto the millions of tourists who flock to their beautiful beaches and amusement parks every year and so, you can understand, Florida’s state government is in dire need to replenish their coffers. But is it okay to lie about a lethal disease in order to lure more tourists back to the state? 

I want to pause here for a moment of clarity. Pathological liars, which many people 

have accused our president of being, are people who have a need to tell a lie, even when the truth would serve them better. It is a compulsive behavior. In all my years, I have only known a couple of people who were compulsive liars. Most liars will tell the truth when the truth serves them, the difference between them and honest people is just this: honest people will tell the truth, even when the truth is not to their advantage. Liars will lie in order to serve their own economic, financial, or personal causes. I think that a lot of journalists and TV news hosts use the descriptor “pathological” to mean, “boy, he lies a lot!” 

The kind of liar that I find to be rather more disturbing are those who are delusional liars. These are not simple con-men who are, like a dishonest used car salesperson, changing the facts in order to trick you or take advantage of you, but more a person who tells a convenient lie and then appears to believe it themselves. 

For example, when President George W. Bush wanted Americans to support an invasion of Iraq to take weapons of mass destruction from Saddam Hussein, and he said, “Free nations don’t develop weapons of mass destruction,” did he recognize the irony and hypocrisy or did he not know that America has the largest arsenal of weapons of mass destruction in the history of the world? Did he know that Saddam didn’t actually have any? Or did he believe that our nuclear arsenal is “good” and only “defensive” and that we are good guys and whoever we invade had it coming? 

There are many countries that our former president cannot visit because, if he did, he would be arrested for war crimes, crimes he is clearly guilty of having committed and yet, we see him in public events, laughing and joking with Michelle Obama (easily the most beloved political figure in the world today), who also seems to be willing to befriend him and join in the charade of pretending that starting an illegal war and killing hundreds of thousands of innocent people is just what you do, you know, some people like to play tennis, some people like to play golf, some presidents try to wipe out polio, others engage in mass murder. You say potato, I say “you are a war criminal.” 

But, honestly, sometimes I feel like I am the only one who cares. There is no hue and cry among Americans to bring the war criminals of the first decade of this century to justice. Do you see how complacent we have become to lies that result in moral outrage? 

The media talking heads are discussing the firing of the watch dog who was investigating Pompeo both for this arms deal with the Saudis and for using staff as personal servants but I have not heard anyone mention the fact that in the Reagan administration, the sale of arms to Iran over the objections of congress became a matter of concern that sent top White House officials to prison and came close to ending the Reagan administration. What is different between this arms sale and the one 40 years ago to Iran? 40 years ago, we still took justice and democracy seriously and doing things illegally as if you were a 3rd world dictator was not tolerated. Now, in the America of Donald Trump, we just fire the investigator. I feel like Democracy has died and somehow, we forgot to even hold a memorial service.

My point here is simply that we can get used to almost anything. My patriarchal ancestors ran a slave plantation in Kentucky, and they were very religious! They didn’t free their slaves because of the moral hypocrisy, their slaves were freed by a Civil War. But I grew up 25 miles away from that old plantation and it didn’t even dawn on me to notice that the black young people that I knew from working on the farm didn’t attend the school that I attended. 

Men and women, it never even dawned on me that schools were segregated until they started talking about school integration on the TV news. The American policy of Apartheid, that kept black citizens in inferior schools, trapped in generational poverty, never even reached my consciousness until it was pointed out to me. We were raised with the belief that America was all about freedom while we kept a significant portion of our population in legal and forced poverty and segregation. 

If preaching has any meaningful role in the 21^st century, it is a weekly attempt at shining a light in the dark places of our awareness . . . those places where we are blinded by the sheer gravitational pull of the status quo . . . the willingness to accept things as they are as being what they should be. Preaching is subject to the charge of being just talk, but, when it is done correctly, it is talk that most people have refused to hear, to think about, or to allow themselves to be otherwise conscious of. Hopefully, it is consciousness raising talk. 

I was struck earlier this year by the HBO special on the history of Chernobyl, that horrible nuclear accident in Russia that happened in the spring of 1986. True to form for Russia, everything they said about the incident was an attempt at covering up the seriousness of the event. The line from the series that arrested my attention, that I took as our wisdom lesson for today, is this simple observation: “Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth. Sooner or later that debt is paid.”

I do not personally believe that God judges with reward and punishment for our lies and misdeeds. 

I don’t think that I believe in a Karma, but I have to admit that there is some sense in which the universe seeks moral balance. Honesty is a virtue. Obviously, those of us who sincerely want to be good people will value honesty. It is also true that honesty is its own reward. We are not honest in hopes of avoiding a negative outcome in a final judgement, we are honest because we want to be that kind of person, we want to live a virtuous life. But, without a final judgement, without a supernatural theistic god who intervenes in human affairs, still, there is a debt that is incurred by dishonesty, a debt that somehow will demand payment, if not from the liar, then from the culture that has accepted and grown accustomed to the lies.

The initial deaths from the Chernobyl accident were few, but the lies, the denial, the face saving, caused tens of thousands of deaths over the next few years. Lying creates a debt to the truth, a debt that must eventually be paid. Our invasion of Iraq, which was supposed to be a quick and dirty regime change military event, has turned into a decades long nightmare that has resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands, the wasting of trillions of dollars in resources, and the creation of two or three generations of angry future terrorists. The lies that led us into that war created a debt for which our children and grandchildren will be paying dearly for decades.

Of course, when I outlined this message in January, I had no idea that a pandemic would soon be altering the way the world lives and, frankly, dies. Unless you only listen to Fox News, you know that our president refused to take briefings on the virus in January and that he engaged in denial in February and has been mired in an endless cycle of lies, misinformation, and mismanagement ever since. How many of the nearly 100,000 Americans who have died might have been saved by a more honest and competent response?

It is, of course, impossible to say with certainty, but let me just tell you a little bit about South Korea. On February 16, a 61-year-old woman with a fever attended a crowded church service in Daegu, South Korea. 

Within days, there were hundreds of cases of Covid coming into the hospital. Officials quickly traced these new victims back to their church, demanded a full roster of members from church officials. They then tested every member and those who were positive, they then traced down every person they had been in contact with. As a result of this quick and efficient response, with readily available testing and a public that did not resist the wearing of masks, South Korea has had 264 deaths from the virus as of Thursday of this week. They tested their first case the same day we did. And yes, South Korea is not the United States, in fact, the population density in South Korea is nine times what it is in the United States, so, you might have expected them to have five or six times as many deaths as we have had. But, instead, our casualty count is between 300 and 400 times as great as theirs. 

No one can conclusively say that Trump’s lies are directly responsible for 95,000 deaths in America, because careless and stupid behaviors on the part of many Americans has certainly contributed to the debt created by Trump’s lies and incompetence, but we cannot deny the fact that if we were to trace the tragic death toll in America to a single starting point, the way South Korea traced its biggest outbreak to a single elderly woman at a church service, this whole national nightmare could be traced to the White House, and the blame laid at the feet of one orange narcissist. Rather than a thousand deaths, we have had 95,000. 

I published an article in the Springfield NewsLeader in January about the debt created by lies, though at that time I was talking about Boeing covering up the dangers of a new airplane, the 737 Max, with 346 deaths in two crashes. And I talked about the deception of the Iranian government surrounding a passenger plane that they accidently shot down. 

The point, however, is the same; that our public has grown accustomed to governments, corporations, and even individuals, who tell lies because they don’t like the truth. I don’t think that I have dealt with a single divorce counseling case in 40 years in which both parties didn’t try to describe the other in the most damaging light possible, not because it was true, but because they wanted it to be true. . . we all want to be the hero of our own novels. 

The curious thing about memory is, if you create a false memory and tell the fake story a few times, your memory actually changes and you can no longer remember the truth, you can only remember the lie. I believe that George W. Bush is sincerely offended whenever he hears himself being called a war criminal because he no longer believes that it is true. No one can see inside of Donald Trump’s skull and few would, even if they could, but I suspect that he actually believes a great deal of his own hype, not all of it, but a lot of it. Because he wants it to be true. 

The Trump campaign ushered in an era that many psychologists and journalists called a “post truth” world in which a former Playboy bunny could simply assert that vaccinations cause autism and a whole tribe of soccer moms insist on not vaccinating their children against entirely preventable diseases and a whole army of scientists and physicians are asked to waste their time on talk shows explaining over and over that there is no connection between vaccines and autism. If I may reference last week’s sermon, yes, kids get vaccines and some of them grow up to have autism, but this is a non-sequitur, just because one happened before the other doesn’t mean that the first event caused the second. Many children who were breast fed grew up to vote for Donald Trump but there is no causal connection between breast milk and adult stupidity.

And now, we have “Bubba” claiming 

that the hoped for Covid-19 vaccine is just an excuse so that Bill Gates can implant a GPS tracking chip in you. Add that to climate change deniers and the people who think that 5G cell towers caused the Coronavirus and truth becomes a novelty item reserved for small gatherings of educated liberals. . . may I call this meeting of the Illuminati to order?

In a post truth world, it becomes all the more important for communities of faith to courageously and prophetically both proclaim what is true and to adamantly reject what is false. 

It is not too much of a stretch to say that the lies from the Trump administration about the current pandemic has cost America tens of thousands of lives. Just as lies told by Boeing about their 737 Max cost the world hundreds of needless deaths. And, we can add, decades of lies from both the Catholic Church and many protestant denominations including my former denomination, the Disciples of Christ, covering up pedophile priests and pastors that resulted in untold suffering and not a few suicides, one of whom I knew personally. And individually, when we give into lies, malicious gossip, character assassination . . . there is a debt created that someone will pay.

Let’s not tolerate that immorality in government, business, or religion, and let’s not engage in it ourselves. 

If I may call upon our patron saint, Soren Kierkegaard, to land the final hammer blow today: There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn’t true; the other is to refuse to accept what is true.” In an empire built on lies may we forever be the treasonous ones who are devoted to the truth, no matter where the chips may fall. 

The Ten Commandments of Logic

The Ten Commandments of Logic    May 17, 2020   Dr. Roger Ray, pastor

click here to see the video

The 10 Commandments of Logic (original source uncertain)

• Thou shalt not attack the person’s character, but the argument. (Ad Hominin fallacy)
• Thou shalt not misrepresent or exaggerate a person’s argument in order to make them easier to attack. (Straw Man fallacy)
• Thou shalt not use small numbers to represent the whole. (Hasty Generalization fallacy)
• Thou shalt not argue thy position by assuming one of its premises is true. (Begging the Question fallacy)
• Thou shalt not claim that because something occurred before that it must be the cause. (Post Hoc/False Cause fallacy)
• Thou shalt not reduce the argument down to two possibilities. (False Dichotomy fallacy)
• Thou shalt not argue that because of our ignorance the claim must be true or false. (Ad Ignoratum fallacy)
• Thou shalt not lay the burden of proof onto the person who is questioning the claim. (Burden of Proof Reversal fallacy)
• Thou shalt not assume that “this” follows from “that” when there is no logical connection. (Non Sequitur fallacy)
• Thou shalt not claim that because a premise is popular that it must be true. (Bandwagon fallacy)

The rules of logic are not like the rules of a Monopoly game that just guide the way you play a game. The rules of logic are more like the health department’s standards for food handling for restaurants, rules so that you won’t get food poisoning from your next omelet. The rules of logic are intended to clean up our conversations and make sure that we don’t poison our minds. 

Earlier this year, I was sitting in the home of some friends and, as usually happens when I am around, the conversation turned to politics and the primary that, at that time, still included a couple of dozen candidates. This was before Michael Bloomberg had been a part of a debate, before he had given an interview or made many personal appearances, but he was pouring millions of dollars into market research and carefully crafting a media image for himself that voters would like.

My friend turned to me and said, “I’m really liking Michael Bloomberg.” And because, as you know, I am nothing if not the consummate dinner guest and absolute paragon of patience, I said, “Really?” But what was racing through my head was the fact that they knew nothing about the real Mike Bloomberg, all they knew were his elaborately concocted TV ads that contained no more truth about Bloomberg’s history and policies than my kitchen trashcan contains of the British crown jewels. 

I liked the Michael Bloomberg in the Bloomberg TV ads, who wouldn’t? It’s just the fact that they were not talking about the real Michael Bloomberg. But a month later, when Bloomberg had dropped out of the race, I saw this on TV:

Now, I don’t want to be mean about this. I make mistakes. Last week I put up a picture of Isabelle Peron and called her Eva Peron. Three years ago, I called the river running through the Standing Rock Sioux tribal lands the Mississippi River rather than the Missouri River but, folks, I don’t have a staff of writers back here in my suite of offices and, besides that, Brian Williams is paid $15 million dollars a year . . . he knows something about millions of dollars, and he should know that he could not give a million dollars to 15 million people because he makes 15 million dollars a year. He could give them one dollar. And if Michael Bloomberg gave $500 million to Americans, we would each get about $1.40. And yet, Mara Gay, of the New York Times, no less, sits there shaking her head and saying, “It’s true, there’s just too much money in politics.” This is supposed to be the news channel for educated people! Can somebody revive Walter Cronkite please?

Math and logic are not the same things, but they are related, and both involve learning the rules and using them to come to sane conclusions. Our modern society was created by the age of reason and now our technology threatens to destroy the intellectual processes which make it possible. 

Things do not become true because you believe them, or because you wish them to be true. They are not even true if you think that you feel it or see it. From the singular perspective of this Trump supporter, the earth is both flat and stationary. But thought logic and critical thinking, we know that the earth is spherical and rotating. In the same way, why physicists tell me that the universe is comprised 

of 12 particles of matter held together by four forces of nature, even though I cannot see Quarks or Leptons, nor can I feel the weak force or the strong force, I know that there are well researched and reasoned explanations for how these subatomic particles and forces operate. 

There are things, men and women, which can be known, that can be proven, by reason even if we cannot see them or handle them. 

But in the universe of religion, we find people wanting us to believe, even to believe with passion unto martyrdom, in things that cannot be seen or handled and which, frankly, cannot stand up to critical analysis. Which is fine if that is what they want to do but, what I’m suggesting is that it does not make sense to try to talk about it. 

Should you venture outside of this building and try to engage a religious person in conversation about what is and what is not true, they will almost inevitably cite scripture. They will assert that the Bible is the word of God and that its authority cannot be questioned. If you ask how they know that it is the word of God and that it cannot be questioned, they will tell you that it says it is in the Bible.

This is what we call the fallacy of begging the question: Thou shalt not argue thy position by assuming one of its premises is true. (Begging the Question fallacy)

I have actually had people point out to me that it says on the cover that it is “holy” and either on the cover or just inside, it says that it is “authorized.” If you have never learned how to think critically, these sorts of circular arguments can be persuasive.

But more so, in the world of religious folks, the Bible is accepted by billions of Christians, the Quran by billions of Muslims, and the Torah by millions of Jews and within their own communities, it may not be cricket to question those texts but, the argument from popularity, is commonly called the “bandwagon fallacy” Thou shalt not claim that because a premise is popular that it must be true. What we in philosophy calls call an “appeal to the consensus mundi” or the “opinion of the world.” 

We recently had a fairly well known progressive writer taking issue with something Bishop Spong had said in one of the videos we have posted of him on our channel, and this fellow said, “Well Spong is wrong about this one point because very many people believe differently.” And I pointed out to him, what very many people believe is called “fashion” not fact. 

When I was in high school, leisure suits were very popular but mere popularity of those double knit polyester tragedies did not make them a fashion standard and by the time Richard Nixon was removed from office, no one would be caught dead in one and I’m not sure which one we were happier to see go . . . Nixon or the leisure suit.

Reality is not determined by popularity. Reality is determined by objective facts. Religion, when it is healthy, does not deny reality, it interprets reality. A person of faith is literally a person who courageously and prophetically interrogates society to demand that it conform to honesty and truth, not deny reality and invest itself in magical imaginary worlds that we have no reason to believe exist.

Again, traditional religion would have us to accept that our religion is true and others are false . . . Christians insist on Jesus as their savior, Muslims insist that only Allah is the true God and Jews point to Yahweh, but there is no evidence of any kind that any of them are right. Any one of them would tell you that you are mortal and have limited knowledge and that you cannot question God, … ok, but I sure can question what you say about God. Again, the rules of logic prohibit defending a claim based on ignorance. Thou shalt not argue that because of our ignorance the claim must be true or false. (Ad Ignoratum fallacy)

Nor does it stand to reason to defend a truth claim by simply saying that you cannot prove it to be false, that is when we say: Thou shalt not lay the burden of proof onto the person who is questioning the claim. (Burden of Proof Reversal fallacy). And, as any freshman logic student can tell you, no one can prove a negative.

I cannot prove that angels and demons are not real but then, I cannot prove that unicorns and leprechauns are not real. What I know is that there is exactly the same evidence for angels and demons as there is for unicorns and leprechauns which is exactly none, except for the people who have claimed to have seen them and only you can decide how much credibility that those people deserve. From my vantage point, the credibility seems pretty remote but some are more charming than others. 

The popular writer, C. S. Lewis, famously insisted that Jesus either is who he says he is, the son of God, or he is a mad man. That is what we call a False Dichotomy, or, “Thou shalt not reduce the argument down to two possibilities.” The larger truth there, something Lewis didn’t know because he didn’t spend a single day in a classroom learning anything about scripture or theology, is that we have no reason to believe that Jesus actually made any of those grand claims about himself, and if he had, then, yes, he was surely mad as a hatter. 

The problem for us, however, is that Jesus is buried in 2000 years of history, Muhammad in 1500 years of history, and Moses, if he existed, then he existed 3200 years ago. So, we end up with a lot of historical “in the weeds” arguments about what is and is not known about them. But religious leaders who have the misfortune of having lived in the modern era, such as the founders of the Mormon church, Joseph Smith and Bingham Young, we can fairly easily demonstrate that they were con men who tricked people into letting them start what was basically a sex cult with themselves at the center of the action. 

We can show, from the historical record, that most of the story line of Joseph Smith about the golden tablets and all of the history of the lost Tribes of Israel migrating to the Americas was plagiarized from a book published a few years earlier called the “View of the Hebrews.” DNA testing proves that there is no connection between ancient Hebrew tribes and Native Americans and that translation errors in the King James Bible are also found transferred into the Book of Mormon. 

The historical evidence that Joseph Smith was a con man is over whelming. Wait a second, wrong slide:

 Still, why are there 16 million Mormons in the world, a million and a half of them living in Mexico where many of the events described in the Book of Mormon were said to have taken place…. Where they know there is no evidence for any of it. . . how does this happen?  And yes, one of Joseph Smith’s 40 wives was 14 years old when he married her. None of this is to suggest that the nice family that lives in your neighborhood who are active Mormons believe in polygamy, or pedophilia, nor do they, I strongly suspect, actually believe that Joseph Smith found gold tablets buried in the hills of the Finger Lake region of New York that he was magically able to read through two rocks which described the history of the lost tribes of Israel living in the Americas. 

They go along with a lot of nonsense for the same reason that Catholics and Evangelicals do. . . because their families, their faith community, their social ties, are all among people who either believe or pretend to believe, or who quietly ignore, the more patently absurd aspects of their faith. And no, it is not an ad hominin fallacy if the person’s character is the initial point.

Which, by inference, is how 42% of Americans can still insist that Donald Trump has never told a lie and that he is making America great again. I am not picking on Mormons any more than I am picking on Catholics, Evangelicals, or, for that matter, a lot of our progressive friends who are progressive simply as a matter of preference and not a matter of thought, a conclusion reached by critical thinking. Because, you know, whether he is the least bit sincere in his own faith or not, that Michael Pence knows enough about Evangelical Christianity to know that Donald Trump is not one of him, that he is dishonest, corrupt, and ironically, he is a playboy who has to pay a porn star to have sex with him.  Everybody knows, surely no one is actually fooled, but there is some payoff in pretending, like pretending you believe that Mormon underwear will save you from a plane crash or a Catholic scapular will keep a demon from getting into your heart. And no, the photograph on the right has not been doctored, that is a drunken, smoking, shirtless Mel Gibson demonstrating the proper way to wear a scapular. 

I don’t want to undermine anyone’s religious freedom or their right to choose whatever faith that coincides with their beliefs. I am begging Americans, the British, Australians, South Africans, and Canadians to think critically about your ethics, your politics, and your faith. Because there is a healthier way to live.