Disturbing Hot Topic:
The "Church" Where Sam Lives

Watch this short MSNBC video about the "C Street House," where Sam reportedly lives. A reporter who infiltrated "The Family" wrote a book about it: The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power, by Jeff Sharlet.

Sam and his "Dominionist" "Family" are some of the best arguments for a tall, thick wall of separation between church and state. (This is not the same as a separation between politics and religion, which are human activities, not institutions. It's an important distinction. For example, it's not illegal for "The Family" to believe that you have to "hate" your family and everyone else to be a Christian, or that America should be a kingdom, ruled by The Family as viceregents of Christ, instead of a republic.)

Read about these people. Do we want Sam representing Kansas? Or as governor?

Vocabulary: "Rev. Nocents' Toothbrush"

This is a corollary of Occam's Razor, the principle that the preferred explanation for a phenomenon is the simplest sufficient one. Rev. Nocents' Toothbrush represents the fallacy that simplicity itself is sufficient, a profound misunderstanding of Occam's Razor. Any explanation is simplistic, not simple, if it fails to account for all the facts (see Occam's Razor).

The Toothbrush has been phrased this way: "If the scientific explanation is too hard to understand, make up a deceptively simple fable." Richard Dawkins, in The God Delusion, points to a good example: to explain the origin of life on Earth, some people argue that it is actually harder to believe the hugely complex process of evolution by natural selection over such an unimaginably long time as described by molecular biologists, than to accept a miraculous creation like the one described in Genesis. "Creation is a simpler explanation," they assert, "so according to Occam's Razor, we should accept the Creation story."

But Dawkins argues that they have replaced a complex explanation with an even more complex one: a single entity, God, powerful and skilled enough to design all of life as we know it and implement the design. But where did God come from?

Suggesting God as a "simple explanation" of the origin of species asks us to accept an even more unlikely explanation than natural selection. It's not a simpler explanation at all, because it doesn't actually explain the facts. It's just simplistic. They haven't used Occam's Razor, but Rev. Nocents' Toothbrush.

The name "Rev. Nocents" refers to an imaginary "Reverend Macon Nocents of Kansas," a personification of the harmful (nocent) illogic of fabulous explanations of natural phenomena. An example is the conflict between the scientific theory of evolution and a literal reading of the book of Genesis in the Bible. "Rev. Nocents of Kansas" alludes to occasional efforts of the Kansas Board of Education to eliminate or de-emphasize the theory of evolution in the public school curriculum (article). The KBOE's membership often reflects the influence of literalist religious views, and this influence occasionally achieves majority status (article).

The term "Rev. Nocents' Toothbrush" was first coined in a discussion on facebook.

Sam's use of Rev. Nocents' Toothbrush is featured in the next article.

Sam: The Answer to the Big Question
("What's the Matter with Kansas?")

Sam Brownback explained in the New York Times opinion pages that, as Mark Twain's schoolboy said, "Faith is believin' what you know ain't so."

Here's what he wrote: "What I Think About Evolution" by Sam Brownback.

Here is an articulate response by someone who knows what "science" means: "Don't Know Much Biology" by Jerry Coyne.

You can make up your own mind. Myself, I'm heartily tired of the willful refusal of people to understand these things:

• Religion doesn't help people understand Nature.
• Science doesn't help people understand God.
• Science is not a "belief": it's a reliable way of knowing what's true.
• Religion is not "truth" merely by virtue of intensity of belief.

Brownback says scientists "continue to feud today" about evolution. Implication: doubt equals error. That's exactly where he misunderstands what science is. (Do religions ever "feud"? More, or less, than scientists, would you say? What does that mean?)

No matter how many times it's explained, Brownback will never hear it. He says so in his essay.

War

"I think there is a just war that is going on in Iraq."
--September 17, 2007
Is he right? Here are some discussions of the Just War Doctrine:
Catholic view (Sam is Catholic)
Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy article
Wikipedia article

It's not enough to remember his name.
You have to remember to vote for somebody else.

Anybody But Brownback.