If you’ve watched more than 15 minutes of television in the last few weeks you have no doubt had your intelligence assaulted by this season’s crop of campaign commercials. But just in case you (wisely) haven’t turned on your TV in the last few weeks, I can assure you that the ads this year are every bit as idiotic as they have been every other election year in recent memory.
Take for example the ads being put out by Jim Marshall’s campaign for the 8th district congressional race. Yes, take them. Please. I can sum up Jim’s entire campaign strategy as demonstrated by these advertisements in just a few sentences. Read over them and then you can quickly change channels if you see his campaign commercial come on and save yourself from the mental anguish of sitting through the whole thing.
It seems that years ago Austin Scott, the Georgia state legislator who is Jim’s Republican opposition this year, voted against a proposed law that would have slapped a 5% tax on money transfers that illegal immigrants sent back to their families in their home countries. Apparently at the time Mr. Scott said he had a “moral problem” slapping this fee on people who were trying to support their families.
Marshall’s ads have gleefully repeated the “moral problem” quote to humiliate Scott in as many creative ways as possible. Their take-away message is that Scott is soft on immigration and therefore not a Real True Conservative, which is what a person has to be to win an election in Georgia. And of course Marshall claims to have supported every tough immigration law that has ever been come down the pike, so you should definitely vote for him because he shares your values.
I have to wonder how much time and money were spent to develop this masterful campaign “strategy”. I’m not sure I agree with Scott’s vote on the issue in question but I’m certainly not ready to tar and feather him over it, either. I think his voting record on immigration and other issues overall is very conservative and it’s silly to reduce a person’s entire political career to one vote and one mini-quote.
Frankly the whole idea of taxing illegal immigrants’ money transfers seems gimmicky and impossible to enforce. I would have probably voted against such a measure myself because it sounds like a huge waste of time and effort that would show very little return. Besides, if we actually identify someone as being in this country illegally, why wouldn’t we just deport them rather than trying to collect a portion of the money they were trying to send back home? Maybe politics is just too complicated for a simple man like me.
Sadly, Scott’s campaign ads haven’t been any more substantive than Marshall’s. The gist of his ads has been to point out that Marshall is a Democrat and so is Nancy Pelosi, therefore you should vote for Austin Scott. Of course the effect is much more impressive when you see the picture of a sad-looking Marshall cut and pasted next to an image of an imperious-looking Pelosi. I doubt very much that Marshall is one of Pelosi’s favorite legislators given his overall conservative (for a Democrat) voting record, but I guess any link to Nancy Pelosi hurts a person’s image in some people’s eyes.
These inane attack ads just make me wish both of these guys could lose. Not because of Scott’s moral problem with taxing illegal immigrants’ wire transfers or because of Marshall’s tenuous association with the villainous Pelosi. No, the reason I can’t get excited about either of these guys is because they are driving me crazy with their unimaginative, lowest-common-denominator attack ads and we still have more than five weeks of this nonsense to endure before Election Day.
And frankly, I have a moral problem with that.
Wednesday, September 22, 2010
Wednesday, September 8, 2010
Is God still “necessary”?
A new book from cosmologist Stephen Hawking came out this week and it seems to be making some people a little hot under the collar. The internationally renowned scientist, who previously authored the best seller “A Brief History of Time”, has apparently declared in his newest book (called “The Grand Design”) that God is “not necessary” to explain the creation of our universe.
Needless to say, his assertion that God wasn’t needed for the Big Bang to blast us into existence has proven to be controversial to say the least. I may be a little cynical, but I expect Hawking and his publishers were aware that his very public denial of the need for a Creator would generate headlines and (more importantly, I’m sure) help pump up sales. Still, there is no reason to believe that Hawking is being insincere, and it would seem that his research and deep thinking has led this highly respected scientist to conclude that the evidence suggests that the universe can get along quite well without the help of a God or gods.
I won’t try and explain his reasons for believing this in detail because, frankly, I’m not nearly smart enough to understand it completely. However, the very simplified explanation is that he believes that the Big Bang actually didn’t produce just one universe but a very large number of alternate universes, each with its own set of physical laws. The universe that we happen to inhabit seems to us to be “finely tuned” to allow the existence of life as we know it, but that’s just the luck of the draw. It’s a variation of the “infinite number of monkeys typing on an infinite number of typewriters would eventually produce the works of Shakespeare” idea, I guess.
Predictably, more than a few people have taken strong issue with Mr. Hawking’s pronouncement that the universe doesn’t need God, and the reactions have been swift and strong. And I think that is as it should be. In a free society, everyone should have their say and we can all judge for ourselves who is enlightened and who is full of hot air (or other things).
What disturbs me a little is the undercurrent of anger, or in some cases what seems like thinly concealed hatred, directed towards people like Hawking when they get on the wrong side of popular religious sentiment. It’s as if some people see him as a danger to society, as if he is going to lead some hapless people astray with his atheist-friendly scientific ideas. It seems plausible that if certain people had their way, books like “The Grand Design” would never see the light of day and people like Hawking would be silenced for the greater good of society.
And I really don’t get that. I mean, does anyone think that God (assuming He does exist) is at all troubled by anything that Stephen Hawking or anyone else has to say about Him? I doubt that is the real concern. More likely, some people may fear that someone who is on the fence about God could be led astray by people like Hawking, thereby putting their eternal souls in peril.
I don’t believe that such concerns are justified. Only a very small percentage of the population (a percentage that certainly doesn’t include me) can really grasp the kind of science that Hawking practices, and I expect that those people who do “get” his theories don’t need anyone to protect them from his dangerous ideas. They are probably sharp enough to work out their beliefs without help from anyone else.
It is equally unlikely that those of us who only dimly grasp the concepts of advanced cosmology are going to give up our beliefs in God based on reading a few paragraphs about multiple universes. If someone were to lose their faith that easily, it wasn’t worth much to begin with.
Needless to say, his assertion that God wasn’t needed for the Big Bang to blast us into existence has proven to be controversial to say the least. I may be a little cynical, but I expect Hawking and his publishers were aware that his very public denial of the need for a Creator would generate headlines and (more importantly, I’m sure) help pump up sales. Still, there is no reason to believe that Hawking is being insincere, and it would seem that his research and deep thinking has led this highly respected scientist to conclude that the evidence suggests that the universe can get along quite well without the help of a God or gods.
I won’t try and explain his reasons for believing this in detail because, frankly, I’m not nearly smart enough to understand it completely. However, the very simplified explanation is that he believes that the Big Bang actually didn’t produce just one universe but a very large number of alternate universes, each with its own set of physical laws. The universe that we happen to inhabit seems to us to be “finely tuned” to allow the existence of life as we know it, but that’s just the luck of the draw. It’s a variation of the “infinite number of monkeys typing on an infinite number of typewriters would eventually produce the works of Shakespeare” idea, I guess.
Predictably, more than a few people have taken strong issue with Mr. Hawking’s pronouncement that the universe doesn’t need God, and the reactions have been swift and strong. And I think that is as it should be. In a free society, everyone should have their say and we can all judge for ourselves who is enlightened and who is full of hot air (or other things).
What disturbs me a little is the undercurrent of anger, or in some cases what seems like thinly concealed hatred, directed towards people like Hawking when they get on the wrong side of popular religious sentiment. It’s as if some people see him as a danger to society, as if he is going to lead some hapless people astray with his atheist-friendly scientific ideas. It seems plausible that if certain people had their way, books like “The Grand Design” would never see the light of day and people like Hawking would be silenced for the greater good of society.
And I really don’t get that. I mean, does anyone think that God (assuming He does exist) is at all troubled by anything that Stephen Hawking or anyone else has to say about Him? I doubt that is the real concern. More likely, some people may fear that someone who is on the fence about God could be led astray by people like Hawking, thereby putting their eternal souls in peril.
I don’t believe that such concerns are justified. Only a very small percentage of the population (a percentage that certainly doesn’t include me) can really grasp the kind of science that Hawking practices, and I expect that those people who do “get” his theories don’t need anyone to protect them from his dangerous ideas. They are probably sharp enough to work out their beliefs without help from anyone else.
It is equally unlikely that those of us who only dimly grasp the concepts of advanced cosmology are going to give up our beliefs in God based on reading a few paragraphs about multiple universes. If someone were to lose their faith that easily, it wasn’t worth much to begin with.
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