Abe Sauer's Great Piece on Why Christian Aid in Haiti Sucks

I don’t read everything that appears on the internet, but surely Abe Sauer’s long, exhaustively-researched hit piece on Christian aid groups in Haiti illegally using government money from USAID to proselytize to the voodoo-practicing Haitians before giving them aid was just about the best thing that flashed across anyone’s monitor last week. The law states that the US government can give money to Christian groups as long as they in turn spend that money caring for the needy and don’t thrust Bibles into native hands at the same time they, the Christian groups, are bandaging up those hands. Because, y’know, if the US formally funded groups devoted spreading evangelical Christianity in the third world it would violate the Constitution in a pretty direct way.

I don’t have anything really to say about the piece itself, other than you should go read it, right now, the whole thing, but I will say that whenever the religious right (and the organizations mentioned in this article are undoubtedly right-wing; they have Sarah Palin’s support and some are overseen by the Graham family) gets the government to bend backwards to appease their agenda, I get visibly angry. Not at the Christians, necessarily, but at the atheists, agnostics, and others that generally oppose the Christians’ goals but aren’t motivated or organized enough to stop them.

Look, I know the United States is a Christian nation--not “founded on Christian principles,” but clearly, dominated demographically by Christians. Furthermore, a lot of these Christians have no problem just standing up and yelling, “Stop teaching my children evolution!” or “Put the Ten Commandments outside of this motherfucking courthouse!” (They don’t say “motherfucking,” but the tone is close enough.) A lot of people who disagree with these statements—which are fucking insane, by the way—are more or less happy to ignore the Christians, or laugh them off, and basically go about their merry, non-spiritual business as organisms.

The problem with this is that the Christians win this way. As an atheist, I’m having more and more of a problem with that.

For years, I didn’t want to argue with any Christians, or be vocal about my non-belief. Because no one wants to listen to that smug asshole atheist yammering about the inconsistencies in the Bible and treating Christians like brain-damaged infants. But there’s a difference between letting people believe what they believe and having a situation where a US-funded aid group refuses to give a job to a Haitian man until he converts to Christianity. That shit is not okay, and it’s not anti-Christian to say so. We don’t have to fruitlessly debate the existence of God to point out that turning USAID into a Christian organization is terrible foreign policy.

Of course, some Christians believe that it is their duty to convert the unbelievers, especially the brown, downtrodden unbelievers who have just gone through a disaster and are emotionally fragile and have more immediate problems than a lack of Jesus, such as, their entire families are dead and they have no food or medicine. If you’re one of those Christians that believes that telling those people about Jesus is “helping” them, fuck you. Read more!

Why Elected Officials Suck, According to Hitchens and Adams

Lovable scamp Christopher Hitchens (not pictured) wrote a column for Slate this week about how odd it is that very few of the intelligent and informed people he’s known in his long career as a public intellectual and drunk have ever though about running for political office. Many of them might do a pretty decent job running the country, but they’re put off by the insane slaughterhouse that is contemporary electoral politics. Quoth Hitch:

What normal person would consider risking their career and their family life in order to undergo the incessant barrage of intrusive questioning about every aspect of their lives since well before college? To face the constant pettifogging and chatter of Facebook and Twitter and have to boast of how many false friends they had made in a weird cyberland? And if only that was the least of it. Then comes the treadmill of fundraising and the unending tyranny of the opinion polls, which many media systems now use as a substitute for news and as a means of creating stories rather than reporting them. And, even if it "works," most of your time in Washington would be spent raising the dough to hang on to your job. No wonder that the best lack all conviction.

That reminds me of a line from another famous atheist, the late Douglas Adams, who penned this line about the paradox of government: “Those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it.”

With all the media scrutiny and waves of negative publicity, in order to want to run for office you’d have to be an emotionally damaged narcissist, a delusional reformer who believes it’s possible to change the system in a meaningful way, or an out-and-out power hungry sociopath. Come election time, we’ll all be voting for candidates who are corrupt at worst, relentlessly bland at best, and most likely have something dark and twisted rattling about in their skulls.

Thankfully for us, the United States has a system that, though designed to elect people uniquely unsuited to have power, is also designed to make sure that those elected officials can’t do anything once they sit down in Washington. With massive majorities in both houses of Congress and one of their own in the White House, the Democrats managed to accomplish some reforms that—despite all the Beckian screaming about Nazis—aren’t exactly earth-shattering. Some companies were prevented from going bankrupt, some more people will have health insurance, and these modest shifts in policy will cost a lot of Democrats their jobs. The struggle for the rights of homosexuals to marry one another and join the army to get shot at (why would one want to do either? some straights ask) is proceeding in the courts, where elected officials can’t get in the way.

Considering the quality of politicians we have on hand, deciding things in the courts, where intelligent people debate with one another using a lot of big words, is probably for the best. And it’s probably for the best, too, that however many Republicans get into office this November, no one will be able to pass or repeal any legislation at all, thanks to the labyrinthine rules of the non-robot Senate.

In Douglas Adams’s universe, the problem of government is solved by turning the president into a democratically elected figurehead, someone who is “always an infuriating but fascinating character. His job is not to wield power but to draw attention from it.” The people who run the universe are a sextet of shadowy figures who in turn (spoiler!) make their decisions based on the advice of an insane autistic old man who lives alone with his cat. The system described by Adams seems sinister and despotic on its face, but it’s probably not a bad way to make policy decisions. Not worse than ours, anyway.
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