Barry Belmont | UNR Students for Liberty

23Mar11 Leaders with ‘Biblical Worldviews’

By: Barry Belmont

Former Governor-turned-political-commentator Mike Huckabee is a man of whom I am not a fan. And it is not just him personally, but everyone he represents: the new conservative Christian Right. The kind of people who want to see In God We Trust on every public building. The kind of people who want to have the ten commandments in every courthouse. The kind of people who want to teach intelligent design in public schools. These people are wrong and wrong in a very significant way.

But I bring Mike Huckabee up because in a recent interview he said that he would “love the world to be lead by people [politicians] who have a biblical worldview.” Now given many of the fundamental tenets lurking away in the Bible, that’s just an extraordinarily outlandish statement in and of itself. Square that with the fact that this nation (and many like it) strive for religious toleration and you can see that Huckabee’s craving for a pseudo-theocracy is rather disturbing.

Anyway, I did some digging and it turns out that in this country you actually cannot hold office in many states if you do not believe in God. That’s right a country whose Constitution says “no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States” has at least seven — that’s right, count ‘em, seven — states within it who expressly do not allow atheists/agnostics/nones to hold public office. They are as follows.

Maryland’s Declaration of Rights

Article 37 – “That no religious test ought ever to be required as a qualification for any office of profit or trust in this State, other than a declaration of belief in the existence of God.”

Mississippi’s State Constitution

Article 14, Section 265 – “No person who denies the existence of a Supreme Being shall hold any office in this state.”

North Carolina’s State Constitution

Article 6, Section 8 – “Disqualifications of office. The following persons shall be disqualified for office: First, any person who shall deny the being of Almighty God.”

South Carolina’s State Constitution

Article 6, Section 2 – “No person who denies the existence of the Supreme Being shall hold any office under this Constitution.”

Tennessee’s State Constitution

Article 9, Section 2 – “No person who denies the being of God, or a future state of rewards and punishments, shall hold any office in the civil department of this state.“

Texas’s State Constitution

Article 1, Section 4 – “No religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office, or public trust, in this State; nor shall any one be excluded from holding office on account of his religious sentiments, provided he acknowledge the existence of a Supreme Being.”

And to top it all off, in Mike Huckabee’s home state of Arkansas:

“No person who denies the being of a God shall hold any office in the civil departments of this State, nor be competent to testify as a witness in any court.”

The only thing preventing Huckabee’s ~~Sharia~~…~~Theocratic~~…~~Christian~~…Biblical law from being fully implemented is the apparent reluctance to enforce the laws already on the books. These are terrible laws and if implemented would make for terrible politicians. To prevent someone from holding a job based on religious beliefs is just as bad as not allowing Democrats or Republicans or libertarians from attaining public office. It punishes and excludes people on what is essentially a ‘thought crime’.

No harm comes to A if B does not believe in a god. There is only the mutual harm of not mutually benefitting from one another’s interactions. A and B can both bring much to the political table, they just have to check their religious inclinations at the door.

View Comments Posted by Barry Belmont in Law, Religion

23Mar11 Lawrence O vs. Glenny B on the Book of Revelation

By: Barry Belmont

Politics and religion have a very nuanced and complicated relationship with one another, historically speaking. This is especially true amongst those figureheads who feel comfortable straddling both fields with impunity. I have in mind the talking heads of Fox News in particular, though many political pundits have at the very least strong religious feelings. And of those pundits and Fox News types, Glenn Beck stands astride it all with his oddly mixed intermingling of new age Mormonism and quasi-libertarianism.

Recently, Beck has put forth the begging-the-question notion that perhaps we are living during the ‘end times’ saying that while he does not know the divine plan of the creator of the universe, a huge earthquake/tsunami combo in one of the least religious countries in the world has got to mean something. This is in line with the belief that some Christians espouse that the world will end on May 21 of this year.

Now, you may be asking, what has all of this got to do with political philosophy? The reason I bring this up is that Glenn Beck is not alone and that a great many people actively believe that the world will end during their lifetime almost exclusively for religious reasons. And the world ending (at least in the Judeo-Christian-Muslim conception) would be the start of the most glorious time that humanity has ever known. As Sam Harris points out, It is no exaggeration to say that if New York were suddenly replaced by a mushroom cloud a not insignificant portion of the population would see a silver lining. They believe this because such horrific disaster is cataloged in the Book of Revelations of the Christian Bible.

How exactly are you to convince people that they should invest in the future, respect the private property rights of others, not sink so heavily into debt when they can rely on a few sheets at the very end of a book to claim that the world will be burned to ash and the righteous glutted on the pleasures of paradise?

Well, MSNBC host, Lawrence O’Donnell has tried one approach, and that is to call out Beck (and thus his supporters) to fess up to the fact that they do not believe in the entirety of the Bible and to cop to the fact that they pick and choose the good parts. His explanation of the situation is nothing short of poetic.

View Comments Posted by Barry Belmont in Religion

23Mar11 Bitcoin, Explained

By: Barry Belmont

Many readers of this website are intrigued by our focus on the digital currency, Bitcoin. As the world’s first decentralized digital currency it has already reached impressive landmarks including surpassing the dollar in value and preparing for large-scale implementation across mobile platforms. However, many are still slightly stumped by how exactly it works and what good it can be. To solve this we’ve got a little video explaining the idea in easy to understand terms.

What this means is that you can take this currency (like any other) and trade it with people for goods and services. A Bitcoin is exactly what you would expect a free market currency to be like: finite, based in something of real value, and freely exchangeable. The reason it may at first seem a bit perplexing is that we are so used to seeing fiat currency that even something like a gold coin might not quite glean in the eye properly.

And for those of you that can stomach the voices:

View Comments Posted by Barry Belmont in Money
Tagged Bitcoin

22Mar11 How Copyright Laws, a Judge, and a Bad Decision Have Crippled the World

By: Barry Belmont

Today, Judge Denny Chin ruled against Google‘s plans to make available some 12 million books in a digital library that could be accessed by anyone with an internet connection. “While the digitisation of books and the creation of a universal digital library would benefit many,” Chin wrote in his decision, Google “simply go[es] too far, [...] giv[ing] Google a significant advantage over competitors, rewarding it for engaging in wholesale copying of copyrighted works without permission.”

More depressing, however, was the fact that the judge rejected the agreement Google reached with the plaintiffs allowing them to continue the digitization and redistribution of books in exchange for an cool $125 million annually. Sounds like a fair deal. But the judge said ‘No’ citing that the ownership (copyrights) of many of the works scanned by Google could not be established.

If you didn’t catch that, I’m going to repeat it, because it is that awful: Since no one is sure who owns the copyright of a particular piece of work, no one is allowed to touch it. What!? Why? That’s like saying you can’t pick up a penny (or a dollar bill) from the street because you can’t properly trace its origins. That. does. not. make. any. sense.

And the judge was able to make this decision so easily because it is not he that will ultimately bear this cost. It’s the hundreds of millions of people who will lack access to tens of millions of books and the vast catalog of information associated with it. This judge’s decision doesn’t just minutely hurt every single human being, it damages the human condition.

What reason could their possibly be to prevent the access to free and open exchange of information? Is the world not better with the internet, with Wikipedia, with knowledge? Cloistering information such that it is not allowed into the hands of others has never been the path of progress and this will be no exception.

It is better to light the world one booklight at a time than to see it cast in darkness as the next chapter of humanity is written.

View Comments Posted by Barry Belmont in Irrational, Justice, Law, Stupid Government
Tagged copyrights, Google, Intellectual Property, intellectual property rights

22Mar11 Gays, Glee, and Big-o-try

By: Barry Belmont

There are children, today, in the twenty-first century, in arguably one of the most advanced and civilized nations to have ever existed on planet earth, that will kill themselves, because they are ashamed they are gay. They are ashamed because for centuries, the notion of homosexuality has been treated with contempt and disgust and those individuals born with homosexual tendencies are met only with derision and hatred. Why? Because some book has a half dozen lines or so (out of literally hundreds of thousands) crystallizing the views of their historical authors about homosexuality. And unfortunately these authors put their lines into the mouth of an infallible character.

This belief is pervasive. The most recent example comes by way of Victoria Jackson (of SNL fame) who blasted the show Glee for showing two male characters kissing. Her response can be seen below (particular attention should be paid to the phrase “It doesn’t matter what I believe, it matter what God believes” as this is the exact problem):

Shows like Glee (and Pretty Little Liars, FTW) have tried to provide an outlet for teens going through that awkward point in their life where they are first learning of their sexual orientation. Rather than showing it in a shameful light, they show it as another of life’s little complications. Yeah, it’s tough, but it’s nothing to be ashamed about. Conversely, by showing it as a natural thing, it drops the stigma and reveals that there really isn’t anything too terrible about two dudes kissing. Acceptance, tolerance, and compassion: this seems like a perfectly fine thing to teach kids.

Bigots hiding behind the poorly chosen words of ancient bigots deserve no respect in this regard. I understand the desire to raise your children as you would like, I understand the need for individuals to believe in what they like, I even understand the uneasiness that might come about through any initial culture shock (and the desire to avoid this uneasiness). But if you dislike gays, immigrants, blacks, Muslims, you are a reprehensible human being. If you hate for no reason than but to hate, you are terrible. If you are a bigot, that’s who you are, and there’s no sugar coating it.

To parse a phrase from the ever verbose Christopher Hitchens, those individuals who hate others on such a basis as Ms. Jackson belong to the infancy of our civilization and deserve to be treated like children. But luckily those of us comfortable with tolerance do not feel our children should be ashamed. They should merely grow up and join the adult table when they’re ready.

View Comments Posted by Barry Belmont in Religion
Tagged Homosexuality

22Mar11 Protesting Budget Cuts, Or, How To Be Completely Ineffective

By: Barry Belmont

Oh public higher education…the trouble you get yourself into. Rather than embracing the streamlining of a bloated and inefficient system, rather than planning reasonably for the future, rather than shouldering responsibility, we had yet another ‘budget cuts’ protest up here at the northern end of the state. A short video of how it all went down can be seen:

What these protestors seem to not understand is how utterly and pointlessly ineffective their protesting is. Singing, dancing, drumming, humming, chanting, shouting, holding up hand drawn signs, and taking eight hour bus rides is not how you convince anybody of anything. Sure it may be fun, but if you think it does one single thing in your favor you’re absolutely wrong.

In fact, imagine if you had been effective, if somehow the governor was convinced by hearing a drum circle singing songs about Nevada’s higher education: Is this really the type of person you want in charge of a state government? Do you really want your governor, the person at the helm, to be so fickle and easily persuaded of the falsity of his opinions, methods, and approaches, that he would drop them immediately after hearing something that rhymed shouted over a megaphone? It would be insulting if such a protest worked.

Now consider the converse, the fact the protest didn’t (and won’t ever) work simply highlights how ridiculous the whole approach is. These protestors are supposed to represent the best and brightest that Nevada has to offer. Nevada’s future if you will. If this really is the case, then it is indeed a bleak future. People with the time to waste drawing signs and sitting on the steps of the state congress are not the people I trust to be paving the road to the future.

And hence, we can only conclude that protesting the budget cuts is (has been, and will forever be) a waste of precious time. If you want to go and sing and dance and have a good time with your friends shouting at politicians and making pretty signs and walking in lines to show how much your education counts for something, by all means, be my guest. Have fun, that’s a good enough reason to do anything. But don’t pretend like you’re making a damn bit of difference.

The rest of us will attend our classes, do our homework, study for our tests, get our jobs, and shape the world.

View Comments Posted by Barry Belmont in Local/Nevada
Tagged Budget Cuts

22Mar11 In God We Trust: A Case Study

By: Barry Belmont

Some people, as it turns out, see absolutely nothing wrong with the national motto of “In God We Trust” appearing on all sorts of things, including the money supply, schools, public universities, etc. This is because their cultural and cognitive biases are blinding them to the actual offensiveness of such a statement by merely reaffirming their own belief. [For instance, someone like me might not mind seeing "Taco Bell is the Best" on all our printed Federal Reserve notes, but fans of Del Taco would certainly have a gripe or two.]

So in order to make it that much more apparent, please enjoy a few samples of how the motto could appear, and see if you’re still 100% A-OK with “In God We Trust” being on everything.

How do you feel when it's not 'your' god? This image by itself should reveal how highly cultural the belief is anyway.

Who says that we even need to trust in a god?

What about the Flying Spaghetti Monster? Is he not a god you would like to see everywhere?

How about straight godless?

...I was kinda hoping for Dog the Bounty Hunter...but this'll do.

It's Peanut Butter & Jelly Time.

Do you get it yet?

Hopefully this gives something to think about. The endorsement of a particular religious doctrine has absolutely no place within the political sphere. Nor should the actions of a few simple-minded and marginally selected troglodytes with the hots for the beautiful simplicity of the the Church-mandated Dark Ages have any bearing on what we as free individuals believe with our own brains and think through with our own thoughts.

But there is a simple solution here: get rid of the public sphere. Privatize money, schools, courthouses. Then you can put whatever motto you would like on anything. Hand out gold bars with ‘Allah is Merciful’ scrawled all over them or straps of leather with “Thor is a douche” and do so with consenting people and I could not begin to care less. The problem stems ultimately from public goods, not from religious ideology. And unfortunately, very few people realize this.

View Comments Posted by Barry Belmont in Irrational, Money, Religion
Tagged In God We Trust, Taco Bell

22Mar11 In God We Trust

By: Barry Belmont

If you haven’t yet heard, Representative Randy Forbes (R-Va) has put forth a House Resolution to reaffirm the national motto as ‘In God We Trust’ by posting this motto on many public buildings including court houses, schools, and practically all governmental buildings. The bill has over sixty co-sponsors and is advancing to the floor of the House of Representatives for discussion and a vote. Forbes has declared that he introduced the bill (several times at this point) because:

This sends a clear message to all these government departments and agencies that it’s all right to put up the motto on our buildings and in our classrooms. And I think it will stop the tide of the chilling effect over the past several years.
[...] We’re not forcing anybody to do anything, but at the same time, we want to stand there to protect people who want to say God in a public building. And we don’t want some government agency telling them that they can’t put the national motto in their buildings or classrooms.

This should strike anyone with even a modicum of sensibility as a morbid idea. Not only should the ‘motto’ of the United States not have any religious connotations (whatever happened to the good ol’ E Pluribus Unum?) but there is absolutely no reason for it to be ‘reaffirmed’ except as a means do to some trolling for Christianity. But what about those 34+ million Americans who express no religious affiliation whatsoever? Put even more bluntly, what about those citizens who downright don’t believe in a god or gods, are they to be forced to endorse an opinion they cannot believe simply so they can enter a court of law? [Stay tuned for the article that follows, showing that in quite a few states, said individuals are not even allowed to hold office...]

All this bill does is reinforce the stigma of atheism, play up a religious streak which has no business in politics, and make its co-sponsors look like nuts. However, this stupidly divisive piece of legislation will at least be doing one good thing: wasting the time of politicians that might otherwise be doing other terrible things, like increasing tariffs or mandating healthcare.

Other than that silver lining this bill is still just a turd shaped cloud that’ll hopefully just go away before it makes a real mess of the place…

View Comments Posted by Barry Belmont in Absurd, Religion, Stupid Government
Tagged Christianity, In God We Trust

20Mar11 Introducing: UNR SFL in Your Pocket

By: Barry Belmont

We over here at the UNR Students for Liberty take pride in our ability to utilize technology on a budget to make our libertarian message more accessible. That it is why it is with great pleasure that I can announce the launch of the mobile version of our website.

I assume that many of you have smartphones available to you, so please feel free to visit and explore. Those of you who have visited our site from a mobile platform before will notice that the site now loads about ~70% faster and is much more readily navigable. We think we have optimized the experience fairly well (though we are always looking for suggestions for improvements to be made) and thus think this will accelerate the pace at which our discussions can be had.