Lamar Smith: what kind of scientist?

**VOX.COM recently published a troubling article about the current chair of the House science committee, Lamar Smith (R-TX) .

"Are you now or have you ever been a climate scientist?"

The headline proclaimed:

The House science committee is worse than the Benghazi committee

The article claims the committee's "open-ended, Orwellian attempts to intimidate some of the nation's leading scientists and scientific institutions" has more dire consequences for the nation than Gowdy & Co's brazenly partisan attack on just one politician, Hillary Clinton. That's because recently Republicans granted chairman Smith vastly more subpoena powers than previous chairs, which Vox points out has much wider and more devastating implications than the Clinton witch hunt. Think of all the critical issues the science committee can affect – climate, NASA, stem cell research, etc – and think of the damage it can do if its aim is to discredit and halt the work of the scientists and institutions that focus on them.

But it's even worse than that

It would be bad enough for any clueless politician with only a secular ideological agenda to head up such an important committee. But it's even worse when you consider this individual's religious beliefs, which few seem to have noticed. I wrote a response to Vox, and this post is an expansion on it:

Thanks for a well-written article on the abuses of Lamar Smith as chair of the science committee. I think the problem is even worse than you detail when one considers that Smith is a long-time Christian Scientist. No, not a scientist who happens to be a Christian, but a card-carrying believer in the religion of Christian Science. I am a former believer and teacher of Christian Science doctrine and can verify that the ideas that his religion espouses are diametrically opposed to what the rest of the world knows as “science.” And the mission of the House science committee. A fundamental concept of the religion is that “matter,” the stuff that normal science investigates, is “unreal.” Yes, the very substance of science is an illusion, and those who profess to be normal scientists are deluded and therefore erroneous from the get-go. The first premise of Christian Science is that only “spiritual” things are real. His hidden agenda, then, is to destroy or at least weaken the credibility of the whole field of all normal science. Republicans in general tout the idea that it’s good for a government official to let religion influence his or her governance. It’s pretty obvious that Lamar Smith, whom I’ve met, intends to shape government policy by his religious beliefs and agenda. Most Christian denominations are not this radical, and have a long history of opposing Christian Science. Do Republicans think that the religious tenets of this politician are acceptable? 

How many of his colleagues understand the nature of Lamar Smith's religious convictions? Could it be that current Republican reasoning is as simplistic as to conclude that if he's a Christian Scientist, well, that's close enough to head the science committee? It's not really that far-fetched. And as the visibility and influence of Christian Science has waned almost to invisibility, he might even seem innocuous, maybe like Ben Carson's Seventh-day Adventism. But he's not.

I met Smith in 2004 while I was working at the headquarters of the Christian Science church in Boston. We exchanged mere pleasantries at a church event, but his attendance attests his commitment to its teachings. Unless he has become a worse Christian Scientist since then, people need to consider the implications if he still believes what his religion teaches. And fundamental to that teaching is the specious nature of the material world – the same material world that most scientists study and work in. If you personally know some Christian Scientists you probably don't think of them being as crazy as that. And perhaps the reason is that in order to appear less fanatical, Christian Scientists tend to practice an unstated dualism, holding privately to the primacy of absolute spiritual reality while going along with the "seeming reality" of the physical world. This sustains a subtle hypocrisy whereby many, if not most, believers indulge in all sorts of materiality, including medical treatment, rationalizing that they and the rest of the world haven't advanced to the wisdom of their teachings. What suits this dualism is a characteristic velveteen veneer, a terminal niceness that hesitates to get all absolute on people – and having to put up with all that push-back. Smith exhibits this veneer, even while wearing the brass knuckles of his newly amped subpoena powers.

Who am I to criticize?

Though I am hostile, for what this blog chronicles are good reasons, I am not an ignorant sniper at Christian Science, as many of its opponents are. My knowledge is deep and extensive: I was a believer and church member for over thirty-five years; wrote for its publications, lectured about and taught its precepts and practice. For twenty of those years I was a professional practitioner of what I ultimately came to realize is the sham of "Christian Science healing." It eventually didn't seem right taking money from people in order to convince them of the unreality of their problems, especially when there was never any discernible, verifiable physical healing as a result. I even pressed those precepts on a mother who let her child die of diabetes even while he screamed for medical attention. That horrendous event and its legal consequences plus five years snarled in the gears of Christian Science church politics led to the end of my faith.

Playing the religion card?

Let's remember that what Republicans mean when they blow the dog whistle of "religious liberty" is that government officials (like Kim Davis) should be free to institute, change or overrule public laws according to their personal religious beliefs. The world is a lot scarier place when legislators like Lamar Smith have extraordinary legal power to frustrate, harass and squelch real scientists and their work. The whacko fringe of the party (arguably not just a fringe) may have found a velveteen-clad wrecking ball in this mild-mannered "scientist."

Government officials like Smith frequently allow their religious beliefs and power to infiltrate the legal realm to generate religious exemptions* that include practices like Christian Science "healing." Though fortunately many of those exemptions, especially for children, have been overturned in recent years, it would not be surprising that a believer like this newly-superempowered chair of the House science committee would try to influence public policy based on his religious convictions. He is and will be as anti-normal-science as his religion, in its purest form, teaches.

Yes, I'm playing the religion card. But not in the way it was played against Romney, whose religion had little to do with government and more to do with its (and his) weirdness. It's more akin to JFK, whose opponents suggested that as a Catholic president he would be more loyal to the Vatican than to the US. But Kennedy stated publicly and firmly that in a conflict between his religion and his country his loyalties would always be with his country. How likely is it that Lamar Smith will publicly proclaim his allegiance to normal science versus that other kind?

Play mystery for me

**About a month ago we moved into our present home. A couple days later I met our next door neighbors. It was a very brief wave and just a few words from my porch to their driveway. Their names are Scott and Misty.

Yesterday I was putting the recycling on the curb when Scott and Misty passed by walking their son to the bus stop a block away. We exchanged a few more words about the travails of moving, etc.

Early this morning I awoke to the lyrics of the song “Misty” drifting through my consciousness. I have heard the song before. It’s a good song but I don't recall fixating on it as portrayed in the movie “Play Misty for Me.” But the lyrics kept coming to me as though I had deliberately memorized it. Well, I actually had memorized it — without intending to. 

The brain is a mysterious place. Even slight experiences are stored for a long time and can come bubbling up with no conscious intention. That’s just the nature of memory and brain functioning.

It’s also the nature of human consciousness to fabricate rationales for why these things happen. What is the MEANING of this mysterious appearance of lyrics to a song heard long ago? Am I being clairvoyant? Is someone trying to communicate with me mentally? Am I getting premonitions of future events? What about the words themselves, are they trying to tell me something? I barely remember them, but in these episodes they come streaming back as though I’m actually thinking or saying them for some reason.

The brain works in mysterious ways. Some even call those workings “god.”

Harry Cook is a writer I much admire. He’s an Episcopal priest who realizes that much of religious theory is bullshit, and that people foolishly believe and do things based on theology or religion that don’t make sense, or worse. He calls himself an agnostic, and seems critical of avowed atheists. Much as I generally agree with him I take exception to parts of his latest essay: “Invention of the Gods.” He claims that the “god idea” has always been part of human nature,

“It seems to be hard-wired in Homo sapiens,” he says.

He then goes on to assume that there is such a thing as “god” simply because people have always thought of it. Many would argue that it is a natural response to mystery. “Anthropologists try to help us with that kind of inquiry, but I suspect they might have a hard time distinguishing fear and superstition from a human-divine encounter.” The “human-divine ENCOUNTER”? Does he really mean there's something to "encounter" outside the influence of fear and superstition?

A mystery doesn’t prove anything other than its own existence. Not the existence of another world, another dimension or some kind of supreme being. Fear and ignorance go together like … fear and ignorance and religion. It’s easy to want to counter an overwhelming question with an overwhelming answer, i.e. god. But easy isn't the same as true.

And while such delusions offer comfort there’s also no doubt about the brain’s susceptibility to jiggering. Move a few chemicals around and one feels happy. Move them another way and one feels sad. Any emotion that can happen can be induced without an objective stimulus. It’s what brains do. And anything one can imagine can feel real, even to the point of persuading others to believe the same thing. Religions come from that.

We are not complete captives of our brains. We also have the ability to supersede the dramas that brains produce. Science, facts, reality are discernible by our brains, But it takes education, a dedication to reason and a willingness to dispense with some synthetic “convictions.” It took me a long time, and much pain, to finally dispense with the comforts of religious belief. As I’ve said many times, this has not made me happier, Indeed, it has made me more unhappy. It’s the “bone on bone” of the reality that we are alone and without external assistance. We can strive to be humanists, with the hope that progress can be made toward freedom from delusion, and perhaps toward some kind of durable happiness in spite of the facts. 

Arms against the government

**With every mass shooting we learn that the shooters have arsenals of weapons that they acquired under the Second Amendment:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed. - See more at: http://constitution.findlaw.com/amendment2.html#sthash.0SbjNXB5.dpuf

How anyone could read that amendment and justify the accumulation of many weapons requires such an extensive stretch of interpretation that's it's ludicrous. That justification is often cloaked in the assertion that if ordinary citizens aren't allowed to have guns then the "State" would exert oppressive power and eliminate the freedom of citizens. So granting people the right to bear arms would allow them to band together and form "militias," presumably to engage in military combat against an invader. At first glance, it might seem reasonable, especially considering the times during which those words were drafted into law. "Militias," groups of citizens who banded together for defense, were common, especially during the time of the American Revolution against the occupying British. But the world has changed so radically since then that every concept stated in that amendment is obsolete.

Lawyers and scholars may argue the parsing of that brief statement but what strikes me is that the technology of weaponry has developed so much that the idea of defending against an encroaching government through military force is completely unrealistic. How many guns would it take to keep an army, any modern army, from completely overrunning a "people's militia?" More than could be procured from all the gun shows and stores in the country. Witness the ridiculous show of force in Ferguson,

where a few pieces of surplus military equipment were brought out to intimidate the citizenry. It's clear that if a government wanted to attack any group of citizens, it could do it almost instantly. A citizen "militia" is a fantasy that lives only in the imaginations of paranoid people who use it to rationalize the comfort they receive from their collections of weapons.

We have had misguided amendments in the past, most recently the Eighteenth Amendment, or "Prohibition." Thirteen years after its enactment, when wiser heads prevailed, the Twenty First amendment repealed it. Now it's long past time for the antiquated Second Amendment to be repealed, perhaps with a new amendment that specifies exactly who can possess appropriate weapons for personal self defense if they so choose. However such an amendment is phrased it needs to recognize the speciousness of militias in today's world. Perhaps then meaningful legislation to limit the proliferation of guns will ensue and America will join the rest of the world in reducing and eliminating the plague of mass shootings.

Heres a good statement of the issue: http://crooksandliars.com/2015/10/what-if-second-amendment-didnt-exist