Freedom from religion, Part 2

By Robert Joustra, Globe and Mail, February 22, 2012
Robert Joustra is editor of Cardus Policy in Public. (A Christian think-tank)
In a recent column, The Globe and Mail’s Doug Saunders tackled British Baroness Warsi’s concern for the place of faith in the public square head on, concluding that “the problem in public life isn’t Islam, it’s religion itself.”

It is possible to reach a different conclusion, however, with the understanding that excluding faith from society’s public square creates the emptiness that fuels the fires of the fundamentalism – both secular and faith-inspired – some would prefer to hide from view.

Secularism is not the settled, intellectually stable public project that many suppose. It is not at all clear that religion is poisonous to Canadian public order, or even not implicit to it. Our Constitution literally says otherwise, and it is questionable whether the stark secularism of a political order with no metaphysical bias about the nature of human kind is even possible in a democratic society.
Like Britain, Canada was founded on certain values and principles it still upholds in law and government, values that cannot be demonstrated by naked, rational proposition. Those values come from somewhere. Call it religion. Call it the veil of ignorance, the creator spirit or a consensual contract of cosmopolitan creatures. Still, we believe it. We can’t prove it, like a math problem. It’s just something Canadians believe – theists and atheists alike. Now and then, we actually die for these things.
We have, globally and historically, maintained highly contested, remarkably precise beliefs that are anything but straightforwardly secular, i.e. untainted by faith. The very word “religion” and the separation between the sacred and the secular in public order is itself an invention. The word religion – religio, in Latin – was rarely in use prior to the Reformation. More than a few thinkers have noted the irony of secularism as itself constituting a de facto “religious” system of thought, which defines how and why we can believe things, and where we can talk about them. As some might put it: a secular atheocracy.
Dear My Joustra:
Unfortunately, it is not a secular "atheocracy" that is the most frightening possibility. It is the formal requirement and request that specific political leaders, regardless of their religious affiliation, bring specific demands from their religion into the public through the generation of specific laws that promote and advocate for that specific religion's tenets. For example, in Texas, we have just learned that a woman contemplating an abortion must undergo an ultrasound, performed by a doctor, or licensed technologist, who must ask the woman if she wishes to hear the fetal heart beat, and then the woman must wait twnety-four hours before going through with the abortion. The law is clearly calculated to reduce, if not eliminate, the therapeutic abortion numbers. The law is clearly designed to support the tenet of faith that is at the core of the Roman Catholic church's belief system. The question of the rights of the woman to choose are reduced to the "right of the fetus to live" and that is an exclusively religious dogma.
And while our laws in the west, in countries like Canada, may have emanated from one of several interpretations of the decalogue, and those laws could be seen as an expression of some form of Christian belief system, the struggle for the public square by the various and vehemently held views of various religions has become in recent years, not a foundational cornerstone but a battlefield for control of the state by the various religions.
There is a serious question whether, like Pandora's box being opened and all evils escaping, religion in its most virulent forms of hatred, bigotry and literalism can ever be put back into the bottle. The struggle in the public square then, is not a fear of an atheocracy, but rather of a theocracy that consistently confronts another version of a theocracy, in a violent, and merciless form, deploying methods so toxic that no faith worth the name would recognize.
Standing firmly on a pillar of sand, built on the tenets of a single religious faith, one chooses in doing so, to eliminate the truths that accompany any other faith, without having to enter into that other faith's holy spaces.
It is a recipe for disequilibrium, and for entropy and erosion of that pillar, as the winds of time and change reduce the pillar to a small lump from which there is no vision of the whole truth.
Of course, children will grow up with their parents' advocacy for a religious faith, and they have to know that their's is not the last and only answer to questions of faith or spirituality, or the formation of laws for the state.
And it is the firewall at the entrance to the meeting place of the formal body politic that Mr. Sounders was advocating, and with Mr. Saunders, we concur.

India skirting sanctions by buying Iranian oil in rupees and possibly barter

By R. Nicholas Burns, CNN/GPS website, February 21, 2012

Burns: India lets U.S. down on Iran

Editor's Note: R. Nicholas Burns is Professor of the Practice of Diplomacy and International Politics at the Harvard Kennedy School. He served as Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs from 2005 to 2008. Previously, he was U.S. ambassador to NATO. The following piece was originally published at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government “Power and Policy” blog.
The Indian government’s ill-advised statement last week that it will continue to purchase oil from Iran is a major setback for the U.S. attempt to isolate the Iranian government over the nuclear issue.
The New York Times reported recently that Indian authorities are actively aiding Indian firms to avoid current sanctions by advising them to pay for Iranian oil in Indian rupees. It may go even further by agreeing to barter deals with Iran – all to circumvent the sanctions regime carefully constructed by the U.S. and its friends and allies. According to the Times, India now has the dubious distinction of being the leading importer of Iranian oil.
This is bitterly disappointing news for those of us who have championed a close relationship with India. And, it represents a real setback in the attempt by the last three American Presidents to establish a close and strategic partnership with successive Indian governments.
The Indian government’s defense is that it relies on Iran for 12 percent of its oil imports and can’t afford to break those trade ties. But India has had years to adjust and make alternative arrangements. Ironically, the United States has had considerable success on the sanctions front in recent months. The EU has decided to implement an oil embargo on Iran, the U.S. is introducing Central Bank sanctions and even the East Asian countries, such as China, have imported less Iranian oil in recent months. That makes India’s recent pronouncements seem extremely out of step and out of touch with the new global determination to isolate and pressure Iran to negotiate in order to avoid a catastrophic war.
There’s a larger point here about India’s role in the world. For all the talk about India rising to become a global power, its government doesn’t always act like one. It is all too often focused on its own region but not much beyond it. And, it very seldom provides the kind of concrete leadership on tough issues that is necessary for the smooth functioning of the international system.
The Indian government has supported the four U.N. Security Council resolutions passed since 2006. It says Iran should give up its nuclear ambitions. But India hasn’t stepped up to a leadership role in the negotiations and has resisted the option of being a bridge between the Iranian government and the West. It has, instead, been largely passive and even invisible on this critical issue.
I wrote a Boston Globe column recently arguing that the U.S. should commit to an ambitious, long-term strategic partnership with India. I remain convinced of its value to both countries and to the new global balance of power being created in this century.
With its unhelpfulness on Iran and stonewalling on implementation of the landmark U.S.-India Civil Nuclear Agreement, however, the Indian government is now actively impeding the construction of the strategic relationship it says it wants with the United States.
Presidents Obama and Bush have met India more than halfway in offering concrete and highly visible commitments on issues India cares about. On his state visit to India in November 2010, for example, President Obama committed the U.S. for the very first time to support India’s candidacy for permanent membership on the U.N. Security Council. Like many others who wish to see India become a close strategic partner of the U.S., I supported the president’s announcement.
Unfortunately, India has made no corresponding gesture in return for the big vision that Obama and Bush have offered the Indian leadership. It’s time that India speaks much more clearly about the priority it places on its future with the United States. Most importantly, India must begin to provide the kind of visible leadership on difficult issues such as Iran that its many friends in the United States and around the world had expected to see by now.

Dr. David Suzuki: Japan considering a shift from nuclear to geothermal and other power sources?

By David Suzuki, Globe and Mail, February 21, 2012
My grandparents emigrated from Japan to Canada early in the 20th century. Like my sisters and me, my parents were born and raised in Canada, and English was our first language. Nevertheless, I have retained a strong interest in the fate of Japan and Japanese people.

For centuries, Japan was able to maintain a feudal society by closing its doors to the outside world until Admiral Perry forced the country to open its ports and paved the way for the reforms initiated by the Meiji government. In a remarkably short period, Japan transformed itself into a modern Western society. Again, after the Second World War, Japan underwent another basic shift under U.S. occupation.
Both events demonstrated the incredible cohesiveness of Japanese society, a cohesiveness that underlies the ability to undergo revolutionary change without total social upheaval. Given such past experience, what will Japan’s response be to the triple catastrophes of March 11, 2011?

When the war was ending, my mother’s parents chose to leave Canada, which had treated them like enemy aliens, and return to Japan. They were dropped off in Hiroshima, and both were dead in less than a year. For decades, I have been haunted by a question: How could the world’s only nation to be atom bombed embrace nuclear technology so enthusiastically? It’s clear this was a deliberate imposition by the United States, and in postwar Japan, whatever America wanted, Japan accepted. Fukushima confronts Japan with the reality that there’s no such thing as “foolproof” technology, that nature will always out-fool our best notions.
A month or so ago, I had the opportunity to travel to Japan to work on a documentary that explored the impact of the earthquake and tsunami and the national debate that followed the Fukushima nuclear meltdown.
Nuclear technology creates electricity by boiling water so steam can drive turbines. The technology may be sophisticated, but there are other less risky solutions that, if combined with renewable energy such as wind and solar, will provide an exciting alternative. In Japan, I met some extraordinary scientists and inventors, each with an innovative solution ranging from a magnesium-driven energy cycle to new designs for tidal turbine power. But the option really driving investment was geothermal.
There are tens of thousands of hot springs in Japan that can provide heat and hot water to local communities. It staggers the mind to think that, rather than exploiting the potential of such an abundant energy source, Japan, one of the most seismically active nations in the world, chose to disregard such sustainable gifts as geothermal, wind, sun and tide and invest so massively – and so uncritically – in the “nuclear option.”
The shock of 3/11 was so intense that many Japanese are talking about a mindset shift. Everywhere, there’s evidence they’re starting to rethink their relationship not only with energy but with modern life’s high-consumption ways. I found lots of ideas bubbling in the grassroots, focused on sustainable communities, food and energy. And as I travelled through the area most affected by the tsunami, I was reminded of how the strength of the people – orderliness, discipline and stoicism – is at times undermined by a reluctance to rise up and demand change.
In the past, few Japanese have been willing to stand out. But this attitude has been shifting. Think of what an example Japan could provide to the world if it plotted a path to a sustainable electrical grid based on local, diverse and renewable sources of energy. Where will Japan go? It’s too early to say, but well worth watching.

Harper/Ford political egos a threat to "good government" in Ottawa/Toronto

UPDATE By Marcus Gee, February 22, 2012
Turning a grey transit official into a popular hero is quite a trick, but that is just what the administration of Mayor Rob Ford has accomplished by firing Toronto Transit Commission chief general manager Gary Webster.

As Mr. Webster walked into a special TTC gathering on Tuesday to meet his fate, cheers broke out in the public gallery. Supporters were handing out “I (heart) Gary Webster” buttons. When the 5-4 vote to sack him was announced three hours later, the audience shouted “shame.” Even Bob Kinnear, the sharp-tongued transit-union leader, came to Mr. Webster’s defence.
By Marcus Gee, Globe and Mail, February 17, 2012
The TTC’s (Toronto Transit Commission) Gary Webster is the straightest of straight arrows, a dedicated career public servant who sees his job as giving the best possible advice to city council and the mayor about Toronto’s transit needs. Now he is on the verge of being fired for doing just that.

Mr. Webster’s apparent crime is failing to be the (Mayor Rob and Councillor Doug) Fords’ parrot and echo their transit refrain: “People want subways.” Instead of telling them what they want to hear, he told them what he, as a professional with 35 years of service at the TTC, thinks is right. So, off with his head.
Usually, we do not focus on municipal issues, even in the metropolitan areas like Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver. However, here we have another of those right-wing neo-con politicians, in Mayor Rob Ford, himself an endorsee of the Harper government, in the last election, using the same tactics as those used by Harper and his gang, on a professional, ethical, and courageous civil servant. Mr. Webster advocates for light rail, in the lower density areas where underground subways are not cost effective. And this trend is bourne out by evidence from around the world. His Mayor wants subways, probably, if the truth were disclosed (which of course it will not be) as a legacy to his time in the Mayor's office. Subways have more political sex-appeal than above ground light rapid rail. They are also much more costly, for obvious reasons.
Ironically, in Toronto as in Ottawa, Harper-Ford both have embarked on "austerity" programs threatening the jobs of thousands in Ottawa, and hundreds, if not thousands in Toronto, yet they both want those big, sexy monuments to their political ego's....in Ottawa it's jets and warships, in Toronto its subways.
Both politicians exhibit a degree of the pugilistic bully, when they do not get their way...and dispose of those they see as obstructing their adamantine will. Recall the resignation from Statistics Canada upon the scrapping of the long form census, of its top statistician.
Such methods are neither respectable nor warranted in either arena. Both politicians are apparently so eager to demonstrate their political testosterone through mega-projects of questionable merit, given that the needs they are attempting to meet can easily be met with much less spending, and much less fanfare.
However, seizing on this "moment" and given that both politicians could likely suffer a defeat at the polls in their next elections (in three years in Toronto and in 2015 in Ottawa).
Nevertheless, both have seriously undermined the ability of their governments to hire top grade civil servants, who would clearly subscribe to the notion of bringing to their political masters the best professional advice available, without worrying about its political consequences.
However, the political consequences are the only thing these two men care about, and at the top of the their list of priorities is their re-election.
Unforunately, the voters consider such a goal far down the list of appropriate goals of either the federal/national leader, or the municipal Mayor.
Not only have they both hurt the prospects of hiring the best available professionals, they have also sent a shot across the bow of those already employed in their respective governments, that, should anyone in a position where they are expected to offer sensitive, courageous and visionary recommendations, with which their political masters might possibly disagree, they might withdraw such courageous, professional, ethical and visionary recommendations, if they would prefer to retain their position.
These are not cabinet members, or elected councillors who are being threatened with firing; these are civil servants, whose job description in any healthy government, would be, should be, must be...to offer the best, most honest, most courageous and most professional advice, and their masters ought to do nothing to discourage such a premise.
Unfortunately, the ego's of these two seem to be standing in the way of "good government", in both cities.

I.A.E.A. Inspectors will not see contentious nuclear sites in Iran?

By Alan Cowell, New York Times,  February 21, 2012
Iran said on Tuesday that a team of United Nations nuclear officials visiting the country for the second time in three weeks would not go to nuclear facilities, despite earlier reports that its members had sought permission to inspect a military complex outside Tehran.
The Associated Press quoted the Foreign Ministry spokesman, Ramin Mehmanparast, as saying the investigators from the International Atomic Energy Agency, who arrived in Tehran on Monday, had no plans to visit the contentious nuclear sites, which the West maintains are part of a covert weapons program.
On Monday, The A.P. said, Iranian radio said the inspectors had asked to visit a military complex outside Tehran that is a suspected secret weapons-making location. It was not clear whether the Iranian authorities had specifically turned down the reported request. I.A.E.A. officials did not immediately return calls seeking clarification.
As the I.A.E.A. delegation left its headquarters in Vienna late Sunday, its leader, Herman Nackaerts, said the delegation wished to investigate “the possible military dimensions” which Tehran insists that the program does not have and which the inspectors’ previous visit did nothing to resolve.
International tension has been rising steadily, as Iran claims significant technological advances in uranium enrichment and threatens retaliation against countries that pursue sanctions against it, including a boycott of its oil.
Shortly after the I.A.E.A. team arrived for talks with Iranian officials, the Iranian government signaled that it might expand a ban on oil shipments to Britain and France, announced on Sunday, to cover other European powers that it deems “hostile” because of broader economic sanctions by the European Union that are scheduled to come into force on July 1. The ban was apparently announced to pre-empt those sanctions, which include a boycott on new purchases.
This is, clearly, a game of high-stakes diplomacy. If the I.A.E.A. inspectors are denied access to the sites where they suspect weapons' grade uranium is being developed, and if their report is inconclusive about such findings, we will all remember the "FAUX" Weapons of Mass Destruction reports out of Iraq that took the U.S. into that country under George W. Bush. The world is watching and waiting for the inspectors' report, conditioning next steps in this Mexican stand-off.
Whether the Israelis will listen to the U.S. pleas to resist attacking what they believe are nuclear facilities in Iran that threaten the stability of both their nation and the Middle East, is another hanging question. Recent rumblings out of Israel, including an announced visit of Prime Minister Netanyahu in the next several week, to both Canada and Washington, would seem to suggest that the visit might well be a prelude to an Israeli attack on Iran's nuclear facilities, with or without a positive, confirming report of weapons grade uranium.
Writing in his blog, Fareed Zakaria, puts it this way about a preemptive strike:
The efforts to delay and disrupt Iran's nuclear program are working. But even if one day Tehran manages to build a few crude bombs, a policy of robust containment and deterrence is better to contemplate than a preemptive war. (From CNN website, February 19, 2012)
The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, interviewed on GPS, on Sunday, reinforced the same point that the U.S. has been making to Israel for some time.
However, without the opportunity to full inspect Iranian facilities, and without a clear and workable resistance to hold Israel back from acting on what she sees as an obvious existential threat, from either the world community or the United States, one can have little if any confidence that a preemptive strike can be avoided.
Already the world is experiencing higher gas prices in part because of the rising tensions over Iran. One has to wonder if their manipulation of the world oil markets will be off-set by Saudi Arabia's increase in production; there is no love lost between Iran and the Saudis.
China is making overtures that it wants to play a more significant role in both Syria and Iran, given that the west has few bargaining chips left to bring these two rogues into some form of compliance. Russia, too, is making noises of military build-up, as Putin seeks to restore some of the former glory of the former Soviet Union.
And the world watches and waits....holding its breath in some considerable anxiety. For, if there is a military action, we will all be affected, some obviously more than others. And this is just one more voice urging restraint by Iran and by Israel, and also on the hawks in the U.S. who would jump at the opportunity to come to the aid of their ally Israel, if the occasion presented itself, as it most definitely would, in the event of a solo strike by Israel on Iran.

Hedges: An essay on LOVE

By Chris Hedges, from truthdig.com, February 19, 2012
Love, the deepest human commitment, the force that defies empirical examination and yet is the defining and most glorious element in human life, the love between two people, between children and parents, between friends, between partners, reminds us of why we have been created for our brief sojourns on the planet. Those who cannot love—and I have seen these deformed human beings in the wars and conflicts I covered—are spiritually and emotionally dead. They affirm themselves through destruction, first of others and then, finally, of themselves. Those incapable of love never live.
“Hell,” Dostoevsky wrote, “is the inability to love.”
And yet, so much is written and said about love that at once diminishes its grandeur and trivializes its meaning. Dr. James Luther Adams, my ethics professor at Harvard Divinity School, cautioned all of us about preaching on love, reminding us that any examination of love had to include, as Erich Fromm pointed out in “Selfishness and Self-Love,” the unmasking of pseudo-love.
God is a verb rather than a noun. God is a process rather than an entity. There is some biblical justification for this. God, after all, answered Moses’ request for revelation with the words, “I AM WHO I AM.” This phrase is probably more accurately translated “I WILL BE WHAT I WILL BE.” God seems to be saying to Moses that the reality of the divine is an experience. God comes to us in the profound flashes of insight that cut through the darkness, in the hope that permits human beings to cope with inevitable despair and suffering, in the healing solidarity of kindness, compassion and self-sacrifice, especially when this compassion allows us to reach out to others, and not only others like us, but those defined by our communities as strangers, as outcasts. “I WILL BE WHAT I WILL BE.” This reality, the reality of the eternal, must be grounded in that which we cannot touch, see or define, in mystery, in a kind of faith in the ultimate worth of compassion, even when the reality of the world around us seems to belittle compassion as futile.
“The courage to be is rooted in the God who appears when God has disappeared in the anxiety of doubt,” wrote Paul Tillich.
Aristotle said that only two living entities are capable of solitude and complete separateness: God and beast. The most acute form of human suffering is loneliness. The isolated human individual can never be fully human. And for those cut off from others, for those alienated from the world around them, the false covenants of race, nationalism, the glorious cause, class and gender compete, with great seduction, against the covenant of love. These sham covenants—and we see them dangled before us daily—are based on exclusion and hatred rather than universality. These sham covenants do not call us to humility and compassion, to an acknowledgement of our own imperfections, but to a form of self-exaltation disguised as love. Those most able to defy these sham covenants are those who are grounded in love, those who find their meaning and worth in intimate relationships that cut through the loneliness and isolation of the human condition.
There are few sanctuaries in war. Couples in love provide one. And it was to such couples that I consistently retreated. These couples repeatedly acted to save those branded as the enemy—Muslims trapped in Serb enclaves in Bosnia or dissidents hunted by the death squads in El Salvador. These rescuers did not act as individuals. Nechama Tec documented this peculiar reality when she studied Polish rescuers of Jews during World War II. Tec did not find any particular character traits or histories that led people to risk their lives for others, often for people they did not know, but she did find they almost always acted because their relationship explained to them the world around them. Love kept them grounded. These couples were not able to halt the destruction and violence around them. They were powerless. They could and often did themselves become victims. But it was with them, seated in a concrete hovel in a refugee camp in Gaza or around a wood stove on a winter night in the hills outside Sarajevo, that I found sanity and peace, that I was reminded of what it means to be human. It seemed it was only in such homes that I ever truly slept during war.
Love, when it is deep and sustained by two individuals, includes self-giving—often tremendous self-sacrifice—as well as desire. For the covenant of love recognizes both the fragility and sanctity of all human beings. It recognizes itself in the other. And it alone can save us, especially from ourselves.
Sigmund Freud divided the forces in human nature between the Eros instinct, the impulse within us that propels us to become close to others, to preserve and conserve, and the Thanatos, or death instinct, the impulse that works toward the annihilation of all living things, including ourselves. For Freud these forces were in eternal conflict. All human history, he argued, is a tug of war between these two instincts.
“The meaning of the evolution of civilization is no longer obscure to us,” Freud wrote in “Civilization and Its Discontents.” “It must present the struggle between Eros and Death, between the instinct of life and instinct of destruction, as it works itself out in the human species. This struggle is what all life essentially consists of.”
We are tempted, indeed in a consumer culture encouraged, to reduce life to a simple search for happiness. Happiness, however, withers if there is no meaning. The other temptation is to disavow the search for happiness in order to be faithful to that which provides meaning. But to live only for meaning—indifferent to all happiness—makes us fanatic, self-righteous and cold. It leaves us cut off from our own humanity and the humanity of others. We must hope for grace, for our lives to be sustained by moments of meaning and happiness, both equally worthy of human communion. And it is this grace, this love, which in our darkest moments allows us to endure.

Viktor Frankl in “Man’s Search for Meaning” grappled with Eros and Thanatos in the Auschwitz death camp. He recalled being on a work detail, freezing in the blast of the Polish winter, when he began to think about his wife, who had already been gassed by the Nazis although he did not know it at the time.
“A thought transfixed me,” he wrote, “for the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set down by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth—that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart. The salvation of man is through love and in love.”
Love is an action, a difference we try to make in the world.
“We love our enemy when we love his or her ultimate meaning,” professor Adams told us. “We may have to struggle against what the enemy stands for; we may not feel a personal affinity or passion for him. Yet we are commanded for this person’s sake and for our own and for the sake of the destiny of creation, to love that which should unite us.”
To love that which should unite us requires us to believe there is something that connects us all, to know that at some level all of us love and want to be loved, to base all our actions on the sacred covenant of love, to know that love is an act of will, to refuse to exclude others because of personal difference or race or language or ethnicity or religion. It is easier to be indifferent. It is tempting to hate. Hate propels us to the lust for power, for control, to the Hobbesian nightmare of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. Hate is what people do when they are distressed, as many Americans are now, by uncertainty and fear. If you hate others they will soon hate or fear you. They will reject you. Your behavior assures it. And through hate you become sucked into the sham covenants of the nation, the tribe, and you begin to speak in the language of violence, the language of death.
Love is not selflessness. It is the giving of one’s best self, giving one’s highest self unto the world. It is finding true selfhood. Selflessness is martyrdom, dying for a cause. Selfhood is living for a cause. It is choosing to create good in the world. To love another as one loves oneself is to love the universal self that unites us all. If our body dies, it is the love that we have lived that will remain—what the religious understand as the soul—as the irreducible essence of life. It is the small, inconspicuous things we do that reveal the pity and beauty and ultimate power and mystery of human existence.
Vasily Grossman wrote in his masterpiece “Life and Fate”:
My faith has been tempered in Hell. My faith has emerged from the flames of the crematoria, from the concrete of the gas chamber. I have seen that it is not man who is impotent in the struggle against evil, but the power of evil that is impotent in the struggle against man. The powerlessness of kindness, of senseless kindness, is the secret of its immortality. It can never be conquered. The more stupid, the more senseless, the more helpless it may seem, the vaster it is. Evil is impotent before it. The prophets, religious leaders, reformers, social and political leaders are impotent before it. This dumb, blind love is man’s meaning. Human history is not the battle of good struggling to overcome evil. It is a battle fought by a great evil struggling to crush a small kernel of human kindness. But if what is human in human beings has not been destroyed even now, then evil will never conquer.
To survive as a human being is possible only through love. And, when Thanatos is ascendant, the instinct must be to reach out to those we love, to see in them all the divinity, pity and pathos of the human. And to recognize love in the lives of others, even those with whom we are in conflict—love that is like our own. It does not mean we will avoid suffering or death. It does not mean that we as distinct individuals will survive. But love, in its mystery, has its own power. It alone gives us meaning that endures. It alone allows us to embrace and cherish life. Love has the power both to resist in our nature what we know we must resist and to affirm what we know we must affirm.
From my own experience, I can only add a brief footnote:
After submitting my resignation from an Episcopal church, as vicar, in a small Colorado mission in March 2000, amidst a tumult of anger, conflict and both rejection and projections, after forty months of soul-destroying Thanatos, I was asked by one especially manipulative individual, "Would you reconsider your resignation?"
Quietly, I looked at him, thought briefly, and responded, "No, there is no love here!"
After six months' work on a "music" festival, struggling to survive, in North America, and an especially angry and controlling board member's virulent attack in an initial board meeting, I submitted my resignation, commenting to my wife and to one of the new board members whom I had recruited, "There is no music here!"
And after walking inside a relationship of some eighteen months, and reflecting on the vacuity that characterized the experience, I calmly packed my car and drove across the continent, because I realized 'there was no love there and there never could be.'
As Irving Layton reminds us, we learn what love is from experiencing its absence, its opposite.
And having encountered the depth and the awesome power of love, with my partner, and my grand-daughter and her mother, I never again will wonder about either its power to heal or its power to change us all.

Anti-depressants no better than placebos...researchers...on 60 Minutes

By CBS News, from 60 Minutes website, February 19, 2012 
Do antidepressants work? Since the introduction of Prozac in the 1980s, prescriptions for antidepressants have soared 400 percent, with 17 million Americans currently taking some form of the drug. But how much good is the medication itself doing? "The difference between the effect of a placebo and the effect of an antidepressant is minimal for most people," says Harvard scientist Irving Kirsch.

Kirsch's views are of vital interest to the 17 million Americans who take the drugs, including children as young as six and to the pharmaceutical industry that brings in $11.3 billion a year selling them.

Irving Kirsch is the associate director of the Placebo Studies Program at Harvard Medical School, and he says that his research challenges the very effectiveness of antidepressants.
Irving Kirsch: The difference between the effect of a placebo and the effect of an antidepressant is minimal for most people....
Kirsch: Well, it's not all in your head because the placebos can also affect your body. So if you take a placebo tranquilizer, you're likely to have a lowering of blood pressure and pulse rate. Placebos can decrease pain. And we know that's not all in the mind also because we can track that using neuro-imaging in the brain as well.

He says the doctors who prescribe the pills become part of the placebo effect.
Kirsch: A clinician who cares, who takes the time, who listens to you, who asks questions about your condition and pays attention to what you say, that's the kind of care that can help facilitate a placebo effect.
Dr. Walter Brown is a clinical professor of psychiatry at Brown University's Medical School. He has co-authored two studies that largely corroborate Kirsch's findings.

Brown: The number of antidepressant prescriptions over the last decade has increased and most troublesome, the biggest increase is in the mildly depressed, who are the ones who are least likely to benefit from them.
He says they're getting virtually no benefit from the chemical in the pill. Like most experts, he says these drugs do work for the severely depressed, but he questions the widely held theory that depression is caused by a deficiency in the brain chemical called serotonin, which most of these pills target.
Brown: The experts in the field now believe that that theory is a gross oversimplification and probably is not correct.
(Reporter Leslie) Stahl: And the whole idea of antidepressants is built around this theory?
Brown: Yes, it is.
To approve any drug, the Food and Drug Administration merely requires that companies show their pill is more effective than a placebo in two clinical trials - even if many other drug trials failed.
Brown: The FDA for antidepressants has a fairly low bar. A new drug can be no better than placebo in 10 trials, but if two trials show it to be better, it gets approved.
Stahl: Does that make sense to you?
Brown: That's not the way I would do it if I were the king. But I'm not.
Rest assured. Dr. Brown, many of us wish you were (king)!
When the pharmaceutical industry (against which this blog has railed for months) and the government's drug approval agency (Food and Drug Administration) are both dedicated to the American culture of profit above everything else, including exhaustive scientific trials demonstrating both the efficacy and the limited side effects of any drug, and the public is quite literally assaulted by a relentless campaign of advertising funded by the pharmaceutical industry, this is the kind of story that is, at least to this outside observer, inevitable.
Leslie Stahl told Kirsch in her piece on 60 Minutes, "This is a bomb!"
Dr. Kirsch agreed.
Dr. Brown, through his own independent studies, concurs.
The FDA spokesperson was less than unequivocal in his responses to Stahl's questions.
So just what is the size and scope of this hoax that has been perpetrated by those legitimate, law-abiding, tax-paying, upper echelon social elites who inhabit both the offices of the FDA and the Pharmaceutical company boardrooms, on an unsuspecting, naive, gullible and mildly depressed cadre of millions of Americans, not to mention a similar hoax in other countries, like Canada.
When the health care system is primarily dependent on a doctor's writing a prescription in order to get paid for an office visit, and when the patients come in with an already established list of requests for pills for whatever ailments (including depression, which is quite literally a catch-all for a multitude of discomforts) and the doctor knows that by writing the prescription, the insurance company will pay the bill, both for the drugs at the pharmacy and for his/her writing the prescription, then the inevitable occurs...he writes the prescription, often without even asking more than one or two questions about the nature, source and symptoms of the "ailment." S/He hasn't time to ask more penetrating questions.
Britain's clinical psychiatric spokesman, on 60 Minutes, concurred with the findings of Drs. Kirsch and Brown, and in Great Britain, there has been a significant curtailment of prescriptions for anti-depressants among mildly impacted patients. They have also begun to train a substantial cadre of "talking" therapists as replacements for the chemicals Brits have been pouring into and through their bodies, with little or no effect beyond what could be expected from a placebo.
Maybe the World Health Organization could consider establishing some minimal standards for the practice of medicine, in all countries, with a view to separating the pharmaceutical industry from the medical practitioners, demonstrating that they have established a firewall, and then monitoring the observance (or not) of that firewall in all developed countries, without fear of recrimination when they expose the relative compliance of the various countries.
The public deserves nothing less, and individual governments are unlikely to subscribe to a protocol that would wean the doctors off the teats of the industry, given the length and depth of the dependency.