Edited by Dave Peterson

• It's Potluck Picnic Time

• HUMANIST BOOK DISCUSSION
  Sharon Strong

• Ogranizational News
  Dave Peterson

• LAKE HYPATIA IN JULY...
  Sharon Fratepietro

• Letter to the Editor
  Sandra Grauer

• Letter to the Editor
  Dave Peterson

• Letter to the Editor
  Dave Peterson

• THOUGHTS ON PETER SINGER, HARRIET JOHNSON, AND ETHICAL MATTERS
  Dave Peterson

• WITNESSING THE DRUG WAR IN COLOMBIA
  Sharon Fratepietro

• ENTROPY NO ARGUMENT AGAINST ATHEISM
  Stuart Rue

• LOIN CLOTH SAVES THE DAY FOR NUDE DAVID
  American Atheist News

IT'S POTLUCK PICNIC TIME

Just as every newspaper reprints the `Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus' piece, we repeat the immortal words of Herb Silverman each year: `For the potluck picnic, atheists will bring only food whose ingredients they can see, agnostics are not sure what they will bring or whether there really is food, skeptics will argue whether we really should have a potluck, pagans will bring wine, anarchists will bring whatever they damn well please, and humanists optimistically believe they will help to complement the meal and make it a wonderful experience for all.' Roger's address is 916 E Cooper (on the north (left) side of the road). If you have any questions about directions or cuisine, call Roger at 588-9367.

HUMANIST BOOK DISCUSSION

By Sharon Strong

On Sunday, May 6, from 3:00 to 5:00 p.m., the Humanist Book Discussion Group will gather to talk about "The Gnostic Gospels," by Elaine Pagels. This is a concise and very readable account of some "heretical" texts of the early Christian movement and how they shed light on the political origins of orthodox Christianity. We will meet at the Barnes and Noble store on Sam Rittenberg Blvd. in West Ashley. The book should be available by April 13 in the "Staff Recommends" section at the same Barnes and Noble (at a 20% discount!). The Humanist Book Discussion meets on the first Sunday of each month from September to May at that same Barnes and Noble. Everyone is welcome to participate or just come to listen. For more information, you may contact Sharon Strong at 853-3976.

ORGANIZATIONAL NEWS...

By Dave Peterson

At the Easter weekend convention of the Atheist Alliance, Inc., the board of directors changed the name to Atheist Alliance International, thus preserving the initials. This move reflects the growing interaction we are having with groups outside the US; Canada and France had representatives at the convention, and we support a center in India. The Alliance is also, under the leadership of Bobbie Kirkhart of the Atheists United (Los Angeles), making overtures to the American Atheists about some joint functions.

Next year's convention will be held in Dallas TX on Easter weekend, with the 2003 get-together scheduled for Madison WI, although that may change.

Locally, under Herb Silverman's leadership, the four South Carolina humanist groups SHL, Upstate, Columbia, and the Grand Strand have joined together in a South Carolina Secular Council, similar to ones in Minnesota and Texas. This will give us a structure to get our view across to the media and the government on a statewide basis.

LAKE HYPATIA IN JULY...

By Sharon Fratepietro

A couple of years ago, Herb and I traveled to rural Lake Hypatia, Alabama for a wonderful mid-summer break. I think it took about 6 hours to drive. We were attending the annual Lake Hypatia Freethought Hall Reunion, sponsored by the Alabama Freethought Association. This year, from July 5 ? 8, another reunion will take place. It will be filled with laid-back, kick-your-shoes-off fun and thought-provoking speeches. Children of all ages are welcome and many attend. People without children also participate in large numbers. You can camp in the meadow or stay in a motel a few miles away. You can swim in the lake, play softball, roast marshmallows and eat barbecue at the pavilion. The hall where the speeches take place is air conditioned.

Speakers will include Annie Laurie Gaylor from the Freedom from Religion Foundation (the national sponsor of the event), Woody Kaplan (Wendy Kaminer's significant other), and wonderful Arizona cartoonist Steve Benson `Tooning Out Religion.' (You may remember Steve from our own South Carolina freethought conference last year in Columbia.) Another speaker will be Eugenie Scott from the National Center for Science Education, Berkeley, California.

There's lots more planned, too, and you can get details by phoning me at 577-0637. The cost of the registration and meals is minimal.

LETTERS TO EDITORS

I agree with you about the [Post and Courier's] editorial page. I would also say the same goes for the Letters to the Editor's section as well. I tire of the way this area condescends to its denizens. The denizens that stay who don't conform to the traditions of the system get railroaded. I hate to categorize as I know there are folks out there who are similar to myself, but they get so slotted that there is little tolerance, no real promotions, etc. Check out the letter to the editor by a Mr. Murphree, address not listed in the phone directory, who wrote about non-point-source and point-source pollution. At first he's right, but then comes the kicker. He says the swamp is decayed and polluted and needs to be drained! Ignorance or carefully planned nonsense to put doubt in ignorant people's minds about the wetlands? That way maybe some developer or other parties can do things they wish to do and get support for it! Truly a crazy but almost smart way to bamboozle this city's public. Traditions change, thank you!

Sandra Grauer

To the Carolina Morning News

By Dave Peterson

Cuttino reports on the findings of David Barrett, a `brilliant mathematician' who trained for the Anglican priesthood and who has `dedicated himself to tracking the growth and decline of the worlds' religions. His latest effort is contained in `The World Christian Encyclopedia' by Oxford (University?) Press.' Here we are told (in percentage form) that worldwide Judaism declined from five million in 1990 to one million today. Four million observant Jews, 75 percent of the total, renounced their faith in the last decade? I doubt it. We are told that atheists have declined to 15.2 percent of the worlds' population over the last ten years owing to the decline of communism. I suspect that all this means is that we didn't have good figures in the first place. Real atheists don't change their beliefs with a change in government.

Cuttino then treats us to some numbers for world religions from the Encyclopedia Britannica; e.g., 1,974,181,000 Christians. Another way of saying this is that we know the number of Christians in the world to within plus or minus 500 people. For example, if there were really 1,974,181,600 Christians, the writer would have rounded that off to 1,974,182,000 instead of the number he used. Numbers such as quoted by Cuttino are valueless. Heck, the Southern Baptist Convention alone can't come that close in estimating their membership. As I tell my math and science students at USCB, a false precision only shows your ignorance of the subject.

I suspect the problem here is one inherent to religious belief. When you start by believing, on faith, things that, to say the least, are highly improbable, you lose the skepticism necessary to evaluate information presented to you on a daily basis. What is improbable and what is not become matters, not of fact or judgment, but of what resonates with one's subjective beliefs. It is for this reason that Americans know so many things that are not true.

To the Beaufort Gazette

By Dave Peterson

One could do better by reading Ecclesiastes 3:20-2 which begins: "All are of dust, and all turn to dust again."

As a humanist though, I prefer Edwin H. Wilson's thoughts: `The Humanist lives as if this world were all and enough. He is not otherworldly. He holds that the time spent on the contemplation of a possible afterlife is time wasted. He fears no hell and seeks no heaven, save that which he and others created on earth. He willingly accepts the world that exists on this side of the grave as the place for moral struggle and creative living. He seeks the life abundant for his neighbor as for himself. He is content to live one world at a time and let the next life ? if such there may be ? take care of itself. He need not deny immortality; he simply is not interested. His interests are here.' Well said.

THOUGHTS ON PETER SINGER, HARRIET JOHNSON, AND ETHICAL MATTERS...

by Dave Peterson

In a departure from our usual meeting practice, SHL cosponsored, with several departments of the College of Charleston, a talk by the controversial ethicist Peter Singer, which he titled "Rethinking Life and Death." This was the title also of a 1996 book by him. The talk took place on April 22nd in Physicians Memorial Auditorium at the college. It was well attended, and was notable for the presence of armed security guards. Singer's views are anathema to the "pro-life" crowd, and one never knows when one of their homocide-bent fanatics will attempt something.

I was somewhat disappointed in Singer's presentation. It seemed to me that he brought nothing new to the discussion that had not been made some years ago by Michael Tooley and Singer's colleague, Helga Kuhse. For example, I wrote in the Separationist four years ago, using much older references that:

I think we are all agreed that abortion is the killing of a member of the species Homo sapiens sapiens. The question is whether or not that killing is murder or indeed is wrong per se. Not all killing is wrong; would you argue that we should only eat vegetables that died a natural death. You may say in opposition: vegetables don't have a life that is sanctified; only humans do. In this assumption/argument (commonly called the sanctity-of-life doctrine, SOL) life becomes an intrinsic good whether or not the possessor considers it of value. This is not apparent to those of us who see death as preferable to some kinds of life, a permanently comatose one, for example. More to the point though, the holder of SOL rarely believes it strictly, usually making exceptions for one or more of such circumstances as self defense, capital punishment, fetuses conceived as a result of rape, gross birth defects, etc. In other words, quality-of-life considerations enter into all their formulations.

Further, many argue that human life has sanctity simply because it is human life. This answer tells us nothing about the value of a human life; it is merely specieism. It is no different from saying the members of a particular race have greater value by virtue of their inclusion in that race.

Others argue that only human life has special value because only we are self-aware, rational, autonomous, have a sense of the future, the past, and so on. While science tells us that other species also have these but not to the same degree, there is in this argument an implicit recognition that some lives are more valuable than others based on qualitative distinctions. This has it backwards; it is the qualities that provide sanctity, not the life itself. The life of a grossly defective infant must lack sanctity; we have no qualms about letting it die when it lacks those qualities we define as the essence of being human.

The ethicist Helga Kuhse provides an analogy: Suppose we encounter people from another planet, people who do not look like us but are obviously self-aware, rational, etc. Could we justify the wanton killing of them on the grounds that they are not of our species? Or would we say that the possession of certain qualities, the kind of life a being has, its capacities, all argue against the legitimacy of such killing. Again, it is the qualities that give value to a life, not its `mere' humanness.

The philosopher Michael Tooley has provided detailed, rigorous arguments as to the foundation of a `right to life.' For him, the ability to see oneself as existing over time is a necessary condition for the possession of this right or for the direct wrongness of killing. Tooley argues that the wrongness of an action is related to the extent the action prevents some interests, desires, or preferences from being fulfilled. That is why it is wrong to inflict pain and to wantonly kill a person who desires to go on living. He suggests that the word `person' be reserved for those beings capable of understanding that they are continuing selves. In this analysis, neither fetuses nor infants nor humans with severe brain damage are persons, so it is not wrong to take their life per se. There may well be, on sometimes rare, sometimes frequent occasions, other reasons for not doing so of course. On the other hand, chimps and perhaps other non-humans as well may qualify for personhood. I would argue as Tooley and Kuhse do that `the direct wrongness of killing lies not in the taking of life, but rather in overriding in a most profound way the interests, desires, and preferences of a person who does not want to die.

I think there is not much there that Singer would disagree with; he even used Kuhse's analogy in his talk. Yet, at the time I wrote it I did not know the views of Singer, other than that he was somehow identified with the animal rights movement.

I brought this up with my friend, Gordon Haist, who is chairman of the philosophy department at USC Beaufort. He thought that Singer was not really presenting a new theory of life and death. Rather, he has a gift for publicizing, in a confrontational way, a set of controversial values that he happens to believe in. This is not a bad thing, but neither is it original thinking, which is what I expected to hear.

The question and answer session was interesting, being in large part a dialogue between Singer and Harriet McBryde Johnson, a disabled person who is well known around town as a political activist, attorney, and champion of the rights of the disabled. She gave, as you will recall, a very eloquent talk to SHL in September of '99 on the latter subject which included her opposition to euthanasia and the killing of infants born with severe disabilities such as spina bifida, her condition, and Down Syndrome.

While she makes a very good case for better treatment of the disabled, her stand on euthanasia and the killing of disabled infants is logically flawed. This results from generalizing her own personal experience to include everyone. For example, she puts herself forth as an example of why an infant born with spina bifida should be allowed to live: she is having the time of her life, her experiences are rich and full, and she would have missed that if she had been killed at birth. Well, yes. But if her parents had let her die, she would not have known what she had missed. Johnson is an atheist, so the idea of an afterlife in which she contemplates her former life is not a consideration. She also does not consider the plight of the disabled person who would rather be dead, no matter how loving and supportive the people around him might be. Any theory needs to address the hard cases, the exceptions that need to be explained. I asked Johnson back in '99 what you do about the small percentage of people with chronic pain who are not helped by medication and who want to die. She answered by saying that she did not know of any cases where you could not opiate the patient sufficiently to relieve the pain. She had no answer to the observation that this treatment only turned people into drugged vegetables, a condition some of us would not consider a life worth living.

I have since learned, from an excellent article in the March-April 2001 issue of American Scientist by Jay Yang and Christopher L. Wu -- two researchers into pain and its relief, that there are three kinds of pain: Nociceptive -- resulting from damage to tissue or organs from injury or disease; Neuropathic -- resulting from direct damage to the nervous system or spinal cord; and Psychogenic -- having no discernible physical cause and assumed to be psychological in origin. Opiates and nonsteroidal anti-inflammatories are reasonably effective against nociceptive pain but not against neuropathic pain.

Tricyclic anti-depressants and anti-convulsants are effective against neuropathic pain. Unfortunately, they are slow to work and their side effects -- a decrease in the number of white blood cells, sedation, anemia, and liver dysfunction -- can be severe. For many people, neuropathic chronic pain is a never ending nightmare that in one form or the other will not go away. The same can be said, I'm sure, for some sufferers from psychopathic pain although Yang and Wu do not specifically address that issue.

Given this, I fail to see how one can argue from any point of view other than a religious one -- not playing God, it will be all right in the hereafter, etc. -- that in each and every case it is wrong to end a life. And this is what I think Singer is saying, though he seemingly did not want to pick a fight with Johnson, sitting there in her wheelchair. Upon leaving the hall, an elderly women handed me a flier comparing Singer to Hitler. Aside from the bad taste and faulty reasoning, the flier struck me as irresponsible for being anonymous. Are these zealots ashamed of having their names associated with such calumny? Whether Singer is right or wrong, he presents serious viewpoints that deserve a serious rebuttal if such is available. Ugly personal attacks only reflect upon the assailant.

WITNESSING THE DRUG WAR IN COLOMBIA...

By Sharon Fratepietro

On March 23 I returned from an eleven day trip to Colombia, South America. I went with a human rights delegation of 100 U.S. citizens sponsored by the politically independent organization, Witness for Peace. We wanted to see how the $1.3 billion U.S. aid package called Plan Colombia is affecting the Colombian people.

Most money in Plan Colombia is for military aid: 60 attack helicopters, and up to 500 U.S. military advisors and 300 civilian personnel to train three new anti-narcotics battalions in the Colombian army. The stated goal of Plan Colombia is to help the Colombian police spray Roundup herbicide (glyphosate) from crop-dusting planes on the country's many coca and poppy farms. The coca and poppies provide the base ingredients for 90% of the cocaine and most of the heroin used illegally in the United States.

For 40 years insurgent guerrillas and the Colombian military have been at war. The guerrillas terrorize, kidnap for ransom, and murder both civilians and security forces. They extort protection money from coca and poppy growers. The Colombian military, in which soldiers who have graduated from high school do not serve in combat, has one of the worst human rights records in the hemisphere. Furthermore, many in the military actively or tacitly collaborate with vicious paramilitary death squads. Estimates credit at least 75% of the atrocities in Colombia to paramilitaries, who also traffic in drugs, as do some in the military. But the Colombian people have even more to deal with. An estimated 56% of them earn less than $500 per year, and just one out of four has found a full time job. About two million people are internally displaced by violence and poverty.

Our Witness for Peace delegation talked with U.S. Embassy officials and with Colombians from across the social and political spectrum. We divided into four subgroups and went to four different areas of the country. We slept in hotels, squatters' settlements and farm villages. We learned that up to 75% of the coca and poppies are grown by desperately poor farmers on as little as half an acre, with the average family farm just 2.2 acres. Alternative crops bring little or no return, and few roads exist to take legal crops to market. One group of our delegates went to the province of Putumayo, where thousands of acres of coca were fumigated earlier this year. Our companions heard first-hand testimony that besides coca, legal crops and farm animals had been killed by the Roundup herbicide. They heard from people who suffered medical problems after the spraying, and they saw children whose bodies were still covered with sores attributed by doctors to exposure to Roundup.

Later a U.S. Embassy official told us that Roundup is perfectly safe. He did not mention a Swedish medical study in 1999 linking Roundup to non-Hodgkins lymphoma, or that the Roundup used in Colombia contains additional ingredients, never tested for safety. On March 13, four Colombian governors, including the governor of Putumayo, visited Washington, DC to protest Plan Colombia. They said Plan Colombia had not been discussed with the Colombian people, and that the fumigation of coca since 1996 has caused economic and environmental destruction, and illnesses that include birth defects.

In the Cajibio area of Cauca, we heard a common story. A young farm worker came to my group of delegates pleading for help for his village, invaded two days earlier by paramilitaries. His village was just 18 miles from where we were staying in the homes of farm workers. Soon we learned that paramilitaries had invaded and sealed off seven villages in the area, killing at least two people, and that the Colombian military had abandoned Cajibio. We visited Gov. Floro Tunubala of Cauca, who shared our concern but had no authority over the military. That night a high government official, whose name and office I cannot reveal because his life is in such danger, begged our group to do what we could, as Americans, to convince the military to rescue the people of Cajibio. The next day Lt. Colonel Ricardo Velandia, battalion commander of the army near Cajibio, confirmed to us that his soldiers had left the area because no one would identify the occupying paramilitaries. He said his few resources were severely limited by a priority to protect the Pan American Highway, but that he would send some troops back to Cajibio. Urgent phone calls to his commanding general from the governor of Cauca, Amnesty International, the UN Commission on Human Rights, the International Red Cross, and our Witness for Peace leaders apparently had been persuasive. I don't know how the matter ended, since we had to leave Colombia a few days later.

I heard many opinions in Colombia about Plan Colombia. Everyone said that the government of Colombia is corrupt. Everyone said the guerrillas and coca will never be stopped by military force, but only through massive financial aid to address social and economic inequities. Many people believed that the U.S. condones the paramilitaries who serve as the illegal vanguard of the Colombian military.

And almost everyone asked the same question: Why does the United States blame Colombia for its drug problems, rather than seriously address the drug demand at home?

ENTROPY NO ARGUMENT AGAINST ATHEISM

By Stuart Rue
The Daily University Star
Southwest Texas State U.

(U-WIRE) SAN MARCOS, Texas -- I was having a discussion recently with a friend about the existence of a god. She was trying to use the argument that the principle of entropy, or disorder in a system, proved a god must exist.

Her main point was since order tends to move into disorder, and since there is much order around us, there must have been something supernatural to create all this order.

This line of reasoning showed me how poor her grasp of the subject was. So I would like to take a little time to explain some concepts so no one who reads this column will ever be able to use her argument again. This is not meant to prove there is no god, but that my friend's argument is invalid.

Put your thinking caps on for this one kids, especially those of you who have not had a science class in a while.

Much like water flowing downhill, matter tends to settle into the lowest, most stable energy state possible. It is quite possible to raise or lower energy states, but usually something has to cause this. If you look at an unlit match, you can see it is fairly stable. It will not suddenly burst into flames. This is akin to flowing water encountering a small hill. The water needs a little push to climb the hill so it can continue its downhill journey. When you raise the temperature of the tip of the match by introducing friction heat, the tip becomes unstable enough to undergo a chemical reaction that sends it up in flames.

The match flows from a highly ordered energy state to a spread-out, less-ordered state. It consumes oxygen and converts much of its mass into gas. The fact that this happens is one of the principles of entropy.

Note that none of this has anything to do with order. Order does not mean less entropy. Keep in mind that entropy has less to do with matter than it does with energy. One might say the unburned match was ordered, but in entropy this still increases in making the match.

It is possible to pump water uphill, but it takes energy to do so. It does not happen on its own. Some kind of energy must be added to the system to enable the movement. In fact, even though you are storing potential kinetic energy in the water, you spend more energy than you store. Energy is lost to friction, electrical resistance, sound and many other factors.

This is the same with the match. It may appear to have a highly ordered amount of energy in it, but if you look at all the energy that went into making that match, you would see more energy was dispersed than was ordered.

The main impetus for chemical movement on Earth is energy given to us by the sun. With or without a god, without the sun this planet would be cold and dead. The sun pours energy into our ecosystem and propels much of what we take for granted. The Earth is not a closed system, so we must consider all inputs, however remote they may seem. The energy to make our ordered world does not come from nothing. It comes from the sun.

Entropy is even used in a possible explanation of how life began. Since reactions tend to flow to a lower energy state, the reactions that are capable of such flow will take place. If you imagine a primordial soup with all the building blocks of what we call life, there is very little distinction between a complex chemical reaction and living matter. The differentiation may be so blurry, in fact, that you can ignore it. Humans and other animals can be seen as incredibly complex chemical reactions that disperse energy very efficiently. Even evolutionary mechanisms can be correlated with entropy. Those life forms that disperse energy most efficiently -- those that live the longest and produce the most offspring -- tend to survive.

Back to my original point, principles of entropy can be used to help explain topics from rivers to matches to the beginnings of life, but it says nothing about the existence of a god. Whether you think a god started the universe into motion or you think it was the big bang, a god is not needed for these principles to exist, nor for life or evolution to exist. But it does not rule out the existence of one either. Entropy must increase in a closed system such as the universe (at least we think it is a closed system). Just because the entropic areas are not obvious does not mean a supernatural force is controlling everything. People need to accept that there is no way to prove or disprove the existence of a god through science, and should stop using arguments they do not understand.

(C) 2001 The Daily University Star via U-WIRE

LOIN CLOTH SAVES THE DAY FOR NUDE DAVID...

From American Atheist News

"It seems Michelangelo's attention to detail when sculpting 'David's' genitalia have caused some in this city of about 3,800 to take offense," noted writer Jill Greenwood of the Tampa Tribune. "A city code enforcement officer, acting on complaints from citizens, asked shop manager Chuck Cole to place a cloth around the statue's waist." Cole defended the presence of the "David" statue, though, noting "If I were standing naked on some street corner, that would be different. But this is a representation of a classic masterpiece. It's art, not obscenity."

One local resident, though, says that she was embarrassed when she drove past the statue in the company of her young daughter and several friends who pointed, giggled and commented on the Michelangelo reproduction. Jeanne Johnson, owner of a local barber shop, admitted, "I didn't even know it was art. To me, it's just a naked man standing on the side of the road. Once the girls saw it, I found myself in a position where I had to explain what a penis is."

City officials are diligently poring through municipal code books in hopes of determining whether the classic statuary violates local anti-obscenity statutes. Town manager Jim Drumm lamented, "There's nothing legally we could do about it, since we can't regulate art, but the people that were complaining were demanding that we do something. As a matter of courtesy, we asked the store owners to put a cloth on the statue."

For now, a skimpy loin cloth conceals "David's" carefully molded genitalia; but the cost of soothing the puritanical sensibilities of neighbors who say they were distracted by the concrete penis and other anatomical features may be higher than expected. Some passing motorists are now reportedly stopping to have their pictures taken next to the statue, "and some have even taken a second to peek under the cloth," notes the Tribune.