Georgia offends another atheist

It seems as if Georgia has become something of a flashpoint in the debate over separation of church and state lately.  Last year at this time there was a big brouhaha over prayers being offered and hymns being sung at high school graduations right here in Houston County, which eventually led to our superintendent banning such things from being part of the official program at future graduations.  Now the state is making national news over the practice of Gideons International being allowed to place Bibles in government-operated cabins at state parks.

An atheist named Ed Buckner was disturbed to find a Gideon Bible next to his bed in his cabin at Amicola State Park last month and when he complained to management they temporarily removed all Bibles from their cabins.  The state attorney general soon ruled that the state was not running afoul of the law by allowing the Gideons to Bible-up state park cabins since the books were provided for free and Governor Nathan Deal ordered the Bibles to be returned.

Predictably enough, atheist organizations are now requesting that they be allowed to place their own literature in state park cabins and the state has little choice but to allow them to do so unless they want to be sued.  The governor has said (presumably with a straight face) that of course atheists can place their own literature in state park cabins next to the Bible but he “can’t guarantee its safety.”

I suppose that might be the end of the story, if the world were made up of only Christians and atheists.  But as it turns out there are lots of religions in the world, and lots of them have their own version of Holy Scripture.  The Catholics will want their version of the Bible placed next to the protestant version the Gideons distribute, the Jews will want the Torah and the Talmud in the same drawer, and the Muslims will certainly feel left out if they don’t have a copy of the Koran tucked in there are well.

Let’s not forget the Book of Mormon, the writings of Mary Baker Eddy, and of course we’ll need to throw in a copy of Dianetics for the Scientologists.  We will also need to save a lot of room for Buddhist and Hindu scriptures because there are quite a few sacred texts associated with those religions.

The real fun will start when the pagans want to bless each cabin nightstand with a book on witchcraft.  I know religious folks who won’t let their kids read Harry Potter books for fear they will develop a curiosity for the dark arts.  Just imagine what will happen when Mom tells little Johnny to look for a phone book in one of our state cabin nightstands and he pulls out a copy of the “Book of Shadows.”  Hilarity will, no doubt, ensue.

Being a libertarian, I’m fine with all of it.  Let everyone have their say.  The truth has nothing to fear from honest inquiry, and your faith doesn’t have much value if it can’t stand up to contrary viewpoints.

The only problem I see is that the bedside drawers in our state cabins are not going to be big enough to hold the holy books of all the world’s religions.  Maybe everyone who wants to place a book in a cabin can contribute a nominal fee, say a dollar per cabin, to generate a bookshelf-building fund.  Our state cabins could become known as a Mecca for the study of world religions, where people come to ponder the faiths of the world against a backdrop of Georgia’s finest natural wonders.

It will all be great until someone defaces a copy of the Koran in one of our cabins and someone snaps a picture of it and puts it on the Internet.  How exciting it will be to be governor of Georgia when that day comes.

Let’s get rid of the IRS

So, how was your week?  Chances are you had a better one than our president did.  No fewer than three major scandals engulfed the White House this week before lunch time on Tuesday.  Not since Bill Clinton’s second term have I heard the term “culture of corruption” get bandied about so freely.

Of all the things that have gone wrong for Mr. Obama this week, I think the targeted auditing by the IRS of conservative political groups may be the most damaging and long-lasting scar on his credibility and popularity.  That’s a bit ironic since to date there is no evidence he had any knowledge or complicity in that situation, but when you’re the man in charge you are held liable for everything that happens on your watch.

As it turns out, political misuse of the IRS to attack the opponents of the sitting president is far from a new thing.  There are plenty of well-documented instances of the IRS being used as an attack dog for whoever occupied the White House from FDR all the way to (of course) Bill Clinton.

But no one used the IRS to his political advantage more than John F. Kennedy did.  The abuses during the Kennedy years didn’t just involve “rogue IRS officials” either – audits were conducted at the direct request of powerful politicians.  Kennedy directed the IRS to aggressively audit political groups on both the left and right, and once even ordered an audit to be done on some folks who were noisily interrupting his vacation time.

The problem here is not, in my opinion, that Obama or Kennedy or Clinton was corrupt.  Of course they were corrupt – they were successful politicians.  The problem is really the fact that the IRS exists at all, at least in its current far-too-powerful form.

A really nice silver lining to this latest example of IRS abuse of power would be if the movement to get rid of the institution altogether would gain some momentum.

The federal government is too big, too powerful, and too intrusive in our lives, and the IRS is the tool that it uses to keep us under its thumb.  Congressmen and presidents pass out tax break to whoever they choose and tax and/or audit those they don’t favor. 

Imagine if we took that power away from them with a flat tax or a national sales tax.  No more burdensome paperwork to have to complete (or more likely to pay someone else to complete for you) by April 15 every year.  No more audits.  No more worrying about how the government will penalize you for investment decisions that you make.

It’s a pleasant thought.  But it won’t be an easy sell, especially with the man we currently have in office.  The “progressives” say that we need a progressive income tax system to make sure that the rich “pay their share” and that the burden of financing the government doesn’t fall disproportionately on the poor and middle class.

Come on.  Does anyone really think our current tax system is fair to anyone?  Those of us who pay in pay way too much and there are far too many people who pay no taxes but are feeding at the government trough.  We can do better.  I’m certainly ready to try another way.

Either finance the government with a consumption tax, or let us all pay a flat rate and get rid of all the tax breaks and penalties that necessitate having a huge collection agency that is quite obviously ripe for abuse.

There are already proposals out there to implement one of these plans, that but they haven’t been able to gain much traction because it would mean a less-powerful federal government and few of those in power want to give any of that power up.  Change will only come if we demand it and refuse to take “no” for an answer.

Learning to cope

I’ve written about health issues that I’ve had in the past several times, and I always seem to get a lot of feedback on those columns.  Often that’s because people have either had the same or a similar problem to the one I describe or they know someone who has.  People just tend to bond over shared misery, I guess.

Now I have another chance to bond with the afflicted, and this time my nemesis is insomnia.  It isn’t really a new problem.  I first started having trouble staying asleep for more than a few hours at a time when I developed a thyroid problem in my late 20s.  My doctor prescribed me something at the time that helped a lot and I’ve continued to take it ever since.

It has worked pretty well all these years, but over the last six months or so I noticed my sleep cycle was getting shorter again.  I can’t seem to sleep for more than four hours or so without waking up, and I don’t get up feeling very refreshed in the morning.

I took the issue to my family doctor, and I got to play the always-entertaining role of lab rat once again.  That’s what I call it when a doctor has you “try out” medications that might either make you better, do nothing for you, or make you worse.  The fun part is that medications affect everyone differently, so there’s no way of knowing for sure if a particular drug will help you unless you try it out. 

It’s like when the lead actor on the medical drama “House” would tell a patient that a treatment they were going to try on them would either make them better or kill them, and at least then they’d have the correct diagnosis.  Fortunately in real life these “diagnostic treatments” don’t usually kill you.  Usually.

In this case I tried out three different sleep aids.  They either didn’t work at all or only made me sleep just a bit longer, and they all had the side effect of making me very drowsy the next day.  Ultimately I was no better off.

So I decided to go see a sleep medicine specialist.  I was hopeful that a doctor who specialized in the science of sleep could get this problem nailed down and put me on the road to an effective treatment.

After listening to my history, Dr. Sleep Expert said we needed to do a sleep study to rule out things like sleep apnea and restless leg syndrome, but his initial diagnosis was that (and hopefully this won’t sound too technical) I am just one of those people who doesn’t sleep very well. 

He said I am probably what is known as hyper-aroused.  (No, that’s not as exciting as it sounds.)  People who are hyper-aroused are constantly in a low-level version of the “fight or flight” psychological state.  They have higher than normal stress hormones acting on them at all times and that does not lend itself to falling and staying asleep.

He also told me that I am getting older, and people normally have trouble sleeping as long as they used to as they age.  So the combination of hyper-arousal and advancing age means I probably just need to get used to spending less time asleep.

That’s not the answer I was hoping for, but I appreciated the honesty.  I’d rather get a straight answer in this situation, even if it’s not what I want to hear.

As Shimon Peres once said, “If a problem has no solution, it may not be a problem, but a fact - not to be solved, but to be coped with over time.”  I think as I get older I see that there are a lot of things that initially seem like problems that need to be solved but are really just facts that I need to learn to cope with.