It sucks to be a Christian who doesn’t believe

Sam Leith's title above is paradoxical. How can one be both a Christian and an atheist? One cannot of course. The central event of Chistianity is the resurrection. Denying that that happened severs you from Christianity.

But Sam Leith makes the point not only that we live in a culture suffused by Christian thinking and values but also that we can personally be aware of, and influenced by, elements of Christianity. He is a cultural Christian. I am glad that he has "come out" as that as I am such a person too. The wonderful words of the KJV are burned into my brain too. And I accept Christian principles and values as the best guide to life

And I have been much rewarded by that. Whenever I do the Christian (kind, generous, forgiving) thing I get a reward. Often almost instantly and sometimes after many years. I have found to be true the positive statement of verse 1 in the profoundly wise 11th chapter of the book of Ecclesiastes:

"Cast thy bread upon the waters: for thou SHALT find it after many days" (KJV)

Many atheists seem to be very angry about religion. They even hate it. But there are some of us who grew up under explicitly Christian influences who are very glad of it

Easter Sunday. I went to church for the first time in ages. The little parish church has stood for 900 years in a village near where my parents live. It’s where my father James, who died last week aged 75, will be buried. It was a friendly, pomp-free service of the pragmatic sort – dogs were welcome, and there were tables with colouring-in pens to keep the kids occupied during the Eucharist. There was an easter-egg hunt in the graveyard afterwards.

Pathetic fallacy is a bitch. While my dad was dying, outside the window of his bedroom the wet Wiltshire spring went indifferently about its business. Now, with my dad a week gone, the sun is out and the sky blue. New lambs are cantering unsteadily in the field on the other side of the garden fence. The skirts of the treeline are full of bluebells and daffs. Everything taunts us with new life.

The reading in church was from the resurrection story, as told in the gospel of St John: Mary Magdalene, finding the stone rolled away from the tomb; Mary, confronting the man she takes for the gardener; and the man saying to her: ‘Mary.’ What a freight of feeling there is in that simple pair of syllables.

It’s funny: I found myself tearing up at these familiar points of the story. (Well, maybe not funny: maybe entirely predictable. Last week a YouTube video of the Ukulele Orchestra covering ‘Teenage Dirtbag’ had me in floods.) Even if what it describes never happened, there’s such beauty in the yearning it encodes, and in the generation after generation that have stood in this same place to affirm faith in it or to share that yearning. Here is Larkin’s vast, moth-eaten musical brocade, nothing to be derided.

At the same time, I was inwardly, priggishly disappointed that the gospel reading in this service was in a modern translation. Years of compulsory chapel in C of E schools, somewhat resented, have burned the sombre cadences of the King James Version into me. It occurs to me, with a shade of self-reproach, that in the first place I have no right whatever as an atheist to take a view on the form a Christian service should take – and that in the second, on the evidence of this if I’d been born a few centuries earlier I’d probably have been in favour of seeing William Tyndale burned at the stake for translating the Bible into English.

Yet I do take a view. I don’t think I’m alone in it. The thumbprint of the church is on me. That, I think, is what I identify in myself as cultural Christianity. The historian Tom Holland, among others, has made an eloquent case that we in the West live in a deeply Christian world even where we do not profess the faith. Secular liberal universalism, or whatever you want to call it, comes out of the Sermon on the Mount. The shape of Christian ethics is the shape of our secular ethics. It’s personal as well as societal. To be culturally Christian means to live a life without a shred of faith – yet knowing that the God in whom you don’t believe is the one who died on the cross at Golgotha.

It’s knowing that your father, who also did not believe, nevertheless felt the value of ritual to the human creature – and that to sing ‘Guide Me, O Thou Great Redeemer’ and ‘I Vow To Thee, My Country’ over his coffin will not be just a social formality or a hypocritical hat-tip, but will supply a comforting connection to the deep rhythms of history, to patterns of stories and of language that go back through the years. These stories, these rituals, are rich because they hold meaning in many more ways than the literal.

Poetry supplies the same connection. When we were openly distressed in front of him in the week before he died, my father would say: ‘All shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.’ Julian of Norwich by way of T S Eliot: solace passed across the centuries hand to hand from the dead to the living. Also in his mind were fragments of Yeats: ‘I shall arise and go now.’ We’ll read the closing lines of “Little Gidding’ and ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ at his funeral.

Also, we’ll play some music from the soundtrack of his favourite film, Top Gun. Sublime; ridiculous. Something very ordinary is happening here, something very unremarkable, something that has happened in every church in every generation since a man she took to be a gardener said: ‘Mary.’

I’d like to sit with a takeaway pizza on my lap and watch that movie with him again, crank the sound up and see the excitement on his face as the tomcats jump off the deck of the carrier in the opening minutes. But you know: Goose doesn’t come back. The tomb in Palestine is not the porch of spirits lingering. It sucks to be a Christian who doesn’t believe. I don’t hold out for the resurrection of the body or the promise of life everlasting. I want my Dad to be still alive.

https://spectator.com.au/2022/04/it-sucks-to-be-a-christian-who-doesnt-believe/

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The Myth of Cuban Health Care

How did something so at odds with reality persist for so long? And why is it finally crumbling?

"If there's one thing they do right in Cuba, it's health care," said Michael Moore in a 2007 interview. "Cuba has the best health care system in the entire area," according to Angela Davis, "and in many respects much better than the U.S."

"One thing that is well established in the global health community is the strength of the Cuban national health system," said Clare Wenham, a professor at the London School of Economics.

Claims like these have appeared in hundreds of documentaries, newspaper articles, and magazine features over the years celebrating the supposed marvel of Cuba's health care system. It's a testament to the effectiveness of the Castro regime's propaganda apparatus that this myth, so deeply at odds with reality, has persisted for so long.

"The Cuban health care system is destroyed," Rotceh Rios Molina, a Cuban doctor who escaped the country's medical mission while stationed in Mexico, tells Reason in Spanish. "The doctor's offices are in very bad shape."

"People are dying in the hallways," says José Angel Sánchez, another Cuban doctor who defected from the medical mission in Venezuela, interviewed by Reason in Spanish.

According to Rios, Sánchez, and others with firsthand experience practicing medicine in Cuba, the island nation's health care system is a catastrophe. Clinics lack the most routine supplies, from antibiotics to oxygen and even running water, and their hallways are often occupied by ailing patients because there aren't enough doctors to treat their most basic needs. Cuban hospitals are unsanitary and decrepit. It's exactly what you'd expect in a country impoverished by communism.

The only thing that's changed is that because of social media and the COVID-19 pandemic, the government's propaganda facade has finally started to shatter.

And yet in 2021, some journalists were falling for the claim that the Cuban government had set the model in its response to COVID-19. By July of that year, ordinary Cubans had taken to the streets—and to Twitter and Facebook—in part to call attention to what the pandemic had actually meant for Cuban hospitals and clinics.

In the 15 years since the release of Michael Moore's documentary Sicko, which celebrated Cuban health care, everyday citizens have been armed with smartphones, Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, empowering them to tell the truth about what it's really like to walk into a Cuban hospital.

So how did the Castro regime's propaganda machine manage to fool so many for so long? According to Maria Werlau, executive director of the Cuba Archive, the answer lies with Cuba's foreign medical missions, which are teams of health care professionals dispatched to provide emergency and routine care to foreign countries.

The first medical mission was sent to Algeria in 1963. After the fall of the Soviet Union, when the government lost its major source of aid, the program was ramped up significantly as a source of revenue for the impoverished nation.

The Cuban government has promoted the missions as a humanitarian endeavor, and a demonstration of the community spirit and selflessness central to the communist project. In his 1960 speech "On Revolutionary Medicine," the Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara said that "Individualism…must disappear in Cuba." He recounted the story of a group of physicians in Havana "who demanded remuneration" before going into the country's rural areas to treat the sick. He dreamed of replacing them with a new class of doctors drawn from the peasantry who would "run, immediately and with unreserved enthusiasm, to help their brothers."

Rios participated in the medical mission in Sierra Leone in 2013, where health care specialists from around the world came to help contain the Ebola epidemic. The members of the mission were told that when they returned to Cuba, they would be received as heroes. Rios says that, while he did receive a stipend that went to cover his living expenses, medical personnel from other countries were generously compensated.

The myth of Cuban physicians as selfless healers started to fracture in 2000 when two doctors from the mission in Zimbabwe slipped a note to an airline official with the handwritten word kidnapped. They had denounced the Castro regime and were being brought back to Cuba against their will, possibly to face jail time. Instead, they wound up in the U.S. and were granted political asylum.

In a 2020 report, Human Rights Watch said the Cuban medical missions "violate [doctors'] fundamental rights," including "the right to privacy, freedom of expression and association, liberty, and movement, among others." It noted that "many doctors feel pressured to participate in the missions and fear retaliation if they do not," and that "governments that accept Cuban assistance that includes the abusive conditions imposed by Cuba risk becoming complicit in human rights violations."

In 2006, the George W. Bush administration created the Cuban Medical Professional Parole Program, granting health care workers stationed abroad permanent resident status. All they had to do was make it to a U.S. embassy. Over 7,000 medical workers took advantage of the program.

In 2014, the New York Times op-ed page published an editorial calling for an end to the program. American immigration policy "should not be used to exacerbate the brain drain of an adversarial nation," it noted. In other words, the rights of doctors to decide where and how to live should be subordinate to what was best for the Cuban government.

After the mission in Sierra Leone, Rios was redeployed to a military base in Mexico. One day, he was sent with a group of doctors to buy some phone cards so they could connect with their relatives back home. He decided to make his escape. Rios found a job at a Mexican pharmacy and started saving money to pay a coyote to bring him into the U.S. He was picked up by border officials, and taken to an immigrant detention center for 42 days. After his release, he could join his family in Miami.

In 2018, a group of Cuban doctors who defected from the medical missions sued the Pan American Health Organization, which is part of the World Health Organization, for aiding in human trafficking and for earning $75 million in fees by acting as a middle man.

The medical missions are primarily a way of selling Cuban health care services abroad. So what's health care like for those living on the island?

Julio Cesar Alfonso is the president of the Miami-based Solidarity Without Borders, which helps Cuban doctors who have escaped. He says that there are two health care systems in Cuba—one that is used by the majority of regular citizens, and another that is reserved for tourists and the Cuban elite.

When defenders of Cuban health care acknowledge its deficiencies at all, they usually point the finger at the U.S. trade embargo, which has been in place since 1962. But the deplorable conditions in Cuban hospitals have more to do with a lack of basic health care supplies, which are readily available from other countries, such as antibiotics and steroids. Cuban hospitals also have a shortage of beds and stretchers, and some were without water for six to 12 hours a day at the height of the pandemic.

So what impact does the embargo really have on Cuban health care? Medical products have been technically exempt from the embargo since the passage of the 1992 Cuba Democracy Act. But the law does stipulate that U.S. companies need a license in order to sell to Cuba—and critics are correct to point out that this requirement adds red tape to the process. Total U.S. health care products purchased by Cuba from 2003 to 2021 averaged a mere $1.4 million annually, in what should be a $50 to $100 million market. But it's not the licensing process that accounts for such paltry sales; companies would gladly obtain permission to sell their products to Cuba if they could earn enough money to make it worth the effort. Cuba has a severe foreign currency shortage because it produces little in the way of goods and services that the rest of the world apart from the U.S. wants to buy.

Promoters of Cuban health care often cite the country's infant mortality rate as evidence of its success. "How is this possible" that "an American infant is, by official statistics, almost 50 percent more likely to die than a Cuban infant," wrote Nicholas Kristof in a 2019 New York Times column that looked at one of the most often repeated figures in support of the claim that there's something exceptional about Cuba's health care system.

While conceding that "the figures should be taken with a dose of skepticism," Kristof chose to interpret them regardless in support of his priors: "Cuba has the Medicare for All that many Americans dream about."

Cuba has a variety of strategies for manipulating its infant mortality rate, such as seeing to it that fetuses less likely to survive outside the womb never get the chance. There's significant evidence that Cuban doctors coerce women into aborting fetuses shown to have abnormalities after routine ultrasounds.

Vincent Geloso, who's an assistant professor of economics at George Mason University, co-authored a 2018 paper arguing that Cuba's low infant mortality rate is the result of misclassification using a different indicator known as "late fetal deaths."

Despite reports early in the pandemic that Cuba was an outlier in its success in combating COVID-19, by August of 2021 The New York Times was reporting that Cuba's health care system was "reeling," with oxygen supplies running low, a shortage of syringes, and mortuaries and crematories "overwhelmed." Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel blamed the U.S. trade embargo.

Sánchez thinks that, as the Castros' health care myth crumbles, ordinary Cubans are beginning to realize that they are not threatened by foreign enemies, as the regime propaganda machine has claimed for decades.

"The only enemy of the Cuban people," he says, "is the Cuban government."

https://reason.com/video/2022/04/18/the-myth-of-cuban-health-care/

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Amid the shortage of rental accomodation, some homeowner associations are trying to make the shortage worse

Small groups of neighborhood volunteers are blocking companies from buying single-family homes, rewriting homeownership rulebooks to thwart investor purchases of suburban housing.

These groups, called homeowner associations, spend much of their time enforcing rules related to things such as lawn care and parking. But they often have broad powers to regulate how homes are used.

Some of these associations now believe that the rise in home purchases by rental investors has led to a decline in property maintenance and made their neighborhoods less desirable. Investors are also making it more difficult for local families to buy houses, these groups say.

Homeowner tactics include placing a cap on the number of homes that can be rented in a particular neighborhood, or requiring that rental tenants be approved by the association board. In most cases, associations need at least a two-thirds majority to pass these measures.

In Walkertown, N.C., near Winston-Salem, members of the Whitehall Village Master Homeowners Association are trying to amend their covenants to require new buyers to live in a home or leave it vacant for six months before they can rent it out. This move, they believe, would effectively prevent investors from buying any more houses.

Chase Berrier, the Whitehall Village homeowner group’s president, is concerned that investors are making it harder for families to buy homes.

“They’re coming in, and they’re basically bullying people out with cash offers,” said Chase Berrier, the association’s president who is leading the effort. He said some of the homes in the subdivision owned by investors now look shabbier, and absentee owners are hard to contact to resolve problems.

Investor purchases have been rising in recent years and accounted for more than one in five home sales in December, according to housing research firm CoreLogic. Their effect on the housing market and local neighborhoods has become a hot-button issue across the country. Home prices have also risen at historically high rates during the pandemic, and would-be buyers say they have a hard time competing with companies that pay in cash.

Some housing analysts say that blocking investors from neighborhoods could end up hurting renters, who are often less wealthy than their homeowner counterparts or who struggle to find affordable housing. “There’s a pretty deep and pervasive social stigma against renters,” said Jenny Schuetz, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

These new rules adopted by homeowner associations for single-family homes are already common in condominium and co-operative housing communities, especially in New York City, where many co-op boards limit investor purchases and rentals in their buildings.

It is hard to know exactly how many associations have proposed measures to block investor buyers, but they likely number at least in the thousands.

Since the beginning of 2019, about 30% of the more than 1,000 amendments from HOAs in 21 counties in Florida, Arizona, North Carolina and Texas were leasing and usage restrictions, including restrictions on short- or long-term rentals, according to an analysis by the real estate technology company InspectHOA for The Wall Street Journal. That is up from 21% of amendments filed in the same counties from 2016 to 2018.

State lawmakers are debating how much power homeowner associations should have over rentals. As part of an effort to encourage homeowners to build small rental properties on their land, California now prohibits associations from imposing some limits on long-term leases.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/homeowner-groups-seek-to-stop-investors-from-buying-houses-to-rent-11650274203

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Don't blame crime spikes on "2A Absolutism"

The editors of the Houston Chronicle have a new scapegoat for the age-old problem of violent crime: “Second Amendment absolutism.” As we show on today’s Bearing Arms’ Cam & Co, however, their anti-gun rationale simply doesn’t stand up to the slightest bit of scrutiny, and their calls for criminalizing our right to keep and bear arms would only make us less safe.

The first problem with the Chronicle’s screed comes in its opening paragraph. What do they use as their first piece of evidence that America is devolving into a gun-law-free zone?

The same week that a 62-year-old man boarded a subway train in Brooklyn and opened fire on his fellow passengers with a Glock 9-millimeter handgun, Georgia became the 23rd state to allow almost anybody and everybody to walk around with a concealed handgun on their person, no permit required. Texas was the 20th to dispense with permits; it’s a trend.

That’s right. The paper actually pointed to a shooting on a New York subway by someone who was not lawfully carrying a gun in order to argue that we’re making it too easy to exercise our Second Amendment rights. Of course, they also got the numbers wrong when it comes to Constitutional Carry: Georgia is the 25th state, not the 23rd, to recognize the right to bear arms without the need for a government-issued permission slip.

It’s not an auspicious beginning for the op-ed, which never does make the case that we live in a land of Second Amendment absolutism. There’s no attempt to explain away the hundreds of gun control laws on the books in states like California or New York, not to mention the NFA, GCA, and the other gun laws enshrined in federal statute.

Unfortunately things only get worse from the opening sentences. Here are the Chronicle editors trying (and failing) to make the case that increased gun sales are responsible for the massive upswing in violent crime since 2020.

The subway shooter has been walking around with a gun at least since 2011. That’s when he purchased his gun legally. Millions of his fellow Americans during the past couple of years have been buying guns at an ever-accelerating rate. In March last year, federal background checks reached one million in a week for the first time since the government began tracking them in 1998.

… People usually die when guns are the weapon of choice, and these days they’re dying at accelerating rates. According to data released last year from the FBI, homicides in 2020 were up by a quarter from the year before. Data from a sampling of 37 cities shows that the trend has continued through the first three months of 2022, with about 18 percent more homicides than in the same period last year. Although the homicide rate is still far lower than in the 1990s, the trend is troubling. More guns = more gun deaths.

If more guns = more gun deaths then the number of firearm-related deaths would be climbing each and every year. That’s simply not the case, as this graph from the liberal Brennan Center for Justice shows.

Crime rose almost continually from the early 1960s through the early 1990s; a time period that saw the passage of the Gun Control Act of 1968, bans on handguns in Washington, D.C. and Chicago, California’s ban on “assault weapons”, and a host of other gun control laws enacted at the state and local level. That crime spike also took place before any state save Vermont had adopted Constitutional Carry, and it happened when there were far fewer firearms in the hands of law-abiding Americans.

And then a funny thing happened starting around 1991; violent crime started declining. Yes, even before the Joe Biden-authored ban on “assault weapons” was signed into law by Bill Clinton, violent crime was already declining, and it continued to do so for almost thirty years; a time period that includes the adoption of “shall issue” carry laws by dozens of states, permitless carry laws in more than 12 states, tens of millions of Americans becoming concealed carry licensees, and big surges in gun sales in both 2012 and 2016.

If “more guns = more crime” then none of that would have happened. The level of violent crime never would have peaked in the early 1990s, and it most certainly wouldn’t have dropped by 50% while millions of Americans were bearing arms for the first time.

Honestly, I could pick apart every paragraph of this Chronicle op-ed, but I’ll limit myself to one more item; the editors’ support for Joe Biden’s attempt to talk tough on “ghost guns.”

Biden’s order mandates background checks on ghost-gun purchasers and requires adding serial numbers to the assembled weapons. It’s a modest effort to address a real problem, but like Pavlov’s canine pal, our own Sen. Ted Cruz rose up in hind-legs dudgeon. He announced plans to introduce a resolution to block the ghost-gun order.

“By introducing this resolution, we’re pushing back,” Cruz said, who was joined by three other GOP senators. “We want to stop the false narrative that links the rise in crime to ‘ghost guns,’ and firearms, and we want to protect law-abiding citizens who are exercising their Second Amendment rights.”

Cruz’s Second-Amendment absolutism makes about as much sense as a man stepping into a subway car and opening fire with a Glock. As polls show, most Americans realize that modest gun-safety measures have nothing to do with abridging Second Amendment rights. They have to do with pushing back against only-in-this-country gun insanity, insanity that tolerates gun deaths as mere collateral damage. Only in this country can we rise up and say “Enough.”

You can rise up and say “enough” all you want, and it’s going to have the same impact on violent crime rates that the Gun Control Act of 1968 had; none at all. Biden’s attempt to criminalize some home-built firearms will do more to create non-violent offenders than actually deter violent criminals, and calling it a “modest effort” is a pathetic attempt to avoid labeling the measure what it truly is: ineffective and aimed in the wrong direction. The crime spike that started in 2020 has far more to do with the lack of consequences for criminals than a lack of gun control laws, and instead of putting new laws on the books we should be putting more police on the streets and more prosecutors (and public defenders) in court, while reducing plea bargains and removing non-violent possessory firearm offenses from statute to ensure that our decidedly imperfect criminal justice system is most effective when it comes to the most violent offenders.

https://bearingarms.com/camedwards/2022/04/18/dont-blame-crime-spikes-on-2a-absolutism-n57526

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My other blogs. Main ones below:

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

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