Many religious people insist, in what can only be described as one of the worst cases of pyschological projection, that nonreligious people like myself only disbelieve out of fear of God. In reality, though, I find my own skeptical position much more fearful. I wish more than anything that there were an afterlife, that my existince would continue indefinitely in some form, but I know this is not plausible. Considering my own inevitable mortality fills me with fear, not because I expect to feel any pain or suffering, but because I will not feel anything at all. Unlike many, I don’t think of death as something mysterious or unknown. I suspect being dead will merely mimic unconsciousness—with no dreams, thoughts, or feelings—only extended indefinitely. Unfortunately, I don’t want to be unconscious. There are so many different things that I want to do with my life for which I simply don’t have the time. Hell, I even hate having to sleep every night for precisely this reason—I could be awake, doing something!

Of course, this is not to say that skepticism can’t be optimistic about death and dying. Were it not for death, for instance, would we treat our lives with such value? If life were not always perched precariously upon the cliff of nonexistence, perhaps we wouldn’t think life is anything special, and we’d go through eternity as bored slobs. I personally don’t buy this argument because there would still be aspects of life that we could value. We could still strive to better ourselves, to learn more, to do more. Death is not needed to strive for such things.

Perhaps the most inane form of skeptical optimism concerning death, though, is the rather misguided reassurance that though we may die, we live on in the fact that energy is not created nor destroyed. Our energy has not vanished, but has merely changed form, and in that respect we supposedly persist indefinitely. This consolation, of course, is cold comfort; it is so cold of a comfort that it is like sitting on a loveseat made of ice. Even while we are alive, for instance, our conciousness and thoughts are turned into different forms of energy. This is why our heads give off so much heat, because of our always vigilant cognitive centers in our brain, working endlessly. Notice, of course, that the heat energy we emit from our brains is not conscious itself. When our brain states create heat, we do not live on through this heat in any existentially meaningful way. Our personalities and thoughts, for better or worse, are kept stored within our brains, within a particular arrangement of neurons, and these are not passed on to other forms of energy. When we die, the molecules that make us up will be absorbed into the soil and the air, and we may be broken up into various forms of energy like the chemical energy in a bacteria or heat energy from cremation, but our selves will be gone forever.

Does all this make me a cynical skeptic? I don’t think so. The only reason I abhor these attempted justifications is because I love experiencing life so much. To say that we’d be bored by eternity or not appreciate an ever-lasting life is ridiculous in my eyes, because I’d enjoy what life has to offer regardless of its length. And to say that we can look forward to persisting as molecules, atoms, and energy likewise attempts to devalue the beauty of living consciousness and the capacity to experience and learn about the world. I am optimistic about what little life I have, but I won’t pretend to be optimistic about the reality that awaits me, though I will accept it as inevitable. Life is a wonderful thing, and it doesn’t need to be endless to remain wonderful—though I’d prefer it if life were.

All too often, wild, insane, and rabid frothing at the mouth passes for political discourse in this country. The recent debates concerning health care reform are no different. Raving idiots have hijacked the debate with inane ramblings against mythical health care bills that supposedly contain provisions for creating “death panels,” or beauracratic meetings of ominous government officials who would decide whether granny lives or dies on the basis of the financial feasibility of sustaining her life. Of course, in reality such provisions are completely absent from the bill, and exist solely in the minds of conservative fucktards who can’t even be bothered to read the actual text from the section in question. Sarah Palin, the bumbling nitwit catapulted to fame by John McCain (an act for which I can never forgive him), is emblematic of the problem. Here we have a clueless, ignorant git raving against a bill she clearly has not even bothered to glance at, claiming it entails the euthanasia of the elderly, children with Down Syndrome, and others.

Now, what does the health care bill really say? It isn’t too difficult to find out, as the bill, HR 3200, is freely available online. The section said to allow for “death panels” that would euthanize grandmothers, kill Down Syndrome babies, drown puppies, and perhaps even rape sea otters is Section 1233, starting on page 424. The section basically outlines how doctors should handle Advance Care Planning Consultations if they wish to be compensated by Medicare. In effect, the section attempts to standardize the topics that would be covered in such consultations, sets limits on how often they should be performed for reimbursement purposes, provides exceptions to these rules, and describes the reporting of quality measures. Nothing in the bill even comes close to saying, or even implying, that people would be forced into such consultations and encouraged to end their lives. So what has caused all the drama?

To put it bluntly, the drama has been caused by lying fuckwits who deliberately misinterpret and distort the meaning of Section 1233 to the public to provoke fear and backlash. As a case study of such lying fuckwittery, take this note, titled Concerning the “Death Panels”, from Sarah Palin’s facebook page.

Essentially, proponents of the “death panel” thesis assert that the bill will make Advance Care Planning Consultations mandatory through incentivization and that the larger context of the bill implies that doctors would be encouraged to pressure patients into foregoing life-sustaining treatments to save on costs. Here is Palin, commenting on how the larger context affects the meaning of Section 1233:

These consultations are authorized whenever a Medicare recipient’s health changes significantly or when they enter a nursing home, and they are part of a bill whose stated purpose is “to reduce the growth in health care spending.” [5] Is it any wonder that senior citizens might view such consultations as attempts to convince them to help reduce health care costs by accepting minimal end-of-life care?

Now, Palin is correct that page 5 of HR 3200 says it seeks “to reduce the growth in health spending.” Notice, however, that she has not included the whole sentence. She has not included the first half of the sentence because it utterly destroys her strained argument. Here is the sentence in full, from HR 3200:

This division institutes health delivery system reforms both to increase quality and to reduce growth in health spending so that health care becomes more affordable for businesses, families, and government (5, emphasis mine).

As can be seen, Palin has failed to include the crucial detail that the overall context of the bill is not just to include measures for reducing health care spending, but to include measures that increase quality. Given that context, the Advance Care Consultation section of HR 3200 makes perfect sense. It provides a standardized guideline that doctors must follow to receive compensation, which ensures that patients are given valuable information concerning end-of-life care. It calls for reporting on such measures to assess the quality, to ensure that life sustaining treatment was followed according to the patient’s wishes. Clearly, this fits the overall context of the bill, as stated on page 5, to increase the quality of health care. Either Palin is deliberately leaving out this portion of the quote because her argument falls apart without it, in which case she is a liar and a quote-miner, or else she is too stupid to be able to read and understand what it actually says. I’m inclined to believe the latter, as a result of my generous, benevolent nature.

But suppose, as a purely hypothetical scenario, that the bill’s overall context was only to reduce health care costs, and no mention was made of quality improvement. Even with this generous concession, Palin’s argument falls to pieces. This is because Section 1233 not only details quality improvements, but also provides limitations to Advance Care Consultations that would decrease costs. For instance, the bill states that doctors can be reimbursed for providing such a consultation provided that “the individual involved has not had such a consultation within the last 5 years” (424-425). Clearly, this limitation is intended to reduce health care costs. But perhaps the section details more ways to reduce health care costs, including killing grandmothers and smashing the heads of Down Syndrome infants? Unfortunately, that is not the case. In fact, the text in the section rather explicitly conflicts with any misguided interpretation that says the bill encourages doctors to coerce patients to forego life-sustaining treatments. Here, for example, are just a few quotes from HR 3200 that use language that says the complete opposite:

The level of treatment indicated under subparagraph (A)(ii) may range from an indication for full treatment to an indication to limit some or all or specified interventions (430).

Notice that the bill does not state doctors must coerce doctors to limit interventions, but explicitly states that the patient can choose a preference for “full treatment.” Why would a bill attempting to coerce the elderly into early graves include that as an option?

Such measures shall measure both the creation of and adherence to orders for life sustaining treatment (432).

Why would a bill attempting to euthanize old people provide for quality measures and assessments that would ensure adherence to the patient’s orders for life sustaining treatment?

Clearly, there is nothing that remotely suggests limiting health care interventions in this section, as the text directly asserts that life sustaining treatment should be administered and the overall context is to ensure quality improvements to health care, of which this is surely an example.

Another common criticism of Section 1233 is that it makes Advance Care Planning Consultations mandatory. Of course, nowhere in the text does it actually say this, but conservatives have found ways to misinterpret the text as implying the consultations are mandatory. Here is a representative argument, from Charles Lane’s article “Undue Influence“:

Though not mandatory, as some on the right have claimed, the consultations envisioned in Section 1233 aren’t quite “purely voluntary,” as Rep. Sander M. Levin (D-Mich.) asserts. To me, “purely voluntary” means “not unless the patient requests one.” Section 1233, however, lets doctors initiate the chat and gives them an incentive — money — to do so. Indeed, that’s an incentive to insist.

How offering reimbursement for a service makes that service mandatory is not explained. Anyone with a working brain can see that allowing doctors to be paid for a service would not make it mandatory. For instance, suppose a bill proposed that doctors would be paid for removing appendixes (as they already are). Would anyone in their right mind argue that because doctors are being paid for this service that they would therefore remove everyone’s appendix, whether they need it removed or not? Of course not. The fact that doctors get paid for procedures and consultations doesn’t make them mandatory.

But allow me to be generous again, and assume, for the sake of argument, that such consultations were mandatory. Would this be a terrible thing? As I’ve already detailed previously, the Advance Care Planning Consultation would not coerce patients into limiting interventions, but would allow patients to decide whether they want to receive all potential life sustaining procedures or whether they’d rather forego certain interventions, such as being attached to a feeding device when there is no longer any brain function. Arguably, were such a consultation mandatory, and patients made their desires known, put them in writing, and assigned family members and others to oversee their wishes should they become incapacitated, this would be tremendously beneficial. Conservatives, after all, tend to go completely ape shit in cases like Terri Schiavo’s, in which case her husband and her family disagreed over whether her life support should be discontinued. This could have been avoided had Schiavo been given an opportunity to create a living will expressing her own desires. As such, there is nothing inherently wrong about making such consultations mandatory for patients who need them. It is important for patients to have their wishes fulfilled in their final hours. So in short, even if these consultations were mandatory, which they aren’t, that would hardly be a problem.

The originator of the “death panel” meme was Betsy McCaughey, who appeared on the Daily Show not too long ago. She tries to come across as a knowledgeable, likeable woman divulging the dirty secret found within the dank recesses of the health care bill in the interview, but beneath this presentable exterior is a shrill, irresponsible liar and charlatan who probably has the lower half of a goat, horns, and the number “666″ tattooed across her ass. (I am assuming she is the antichrist given the rather liberal and easily met criteria used nowadays for determining whether someone is the antichrist. See Barack Obama, for example.) Her arguments are so pitiful and strained that I almost feel sorry for her. At one point, for instance, she criticizes advance care directives because patients could change their minds when presented with a life-threatening illness, and she argues that the doctor would have to follow the instructions of the will over the direct protestations of the patient. This is sheer nonsense, and clearly this woman has no idea how living wills function. If a patient is cognizant enough to make his or her desires known, then that takes precedence over a living will. People are allowed to change their minds. These end-of-life care procedures only become necessary when a patient is in a state in which he or she cannot communicate his or her desires—to claim otherwise is outright ignorance and stupidity. Throughout the video clip, she searches endlessly for text that supposedly supports her position, never finds it, and then has it continually debunked by Jon Stewart as he performs the stunning act of reading what the text actually says. It just goes to show that idiocy and ignorance is best fought by demanding evidence.

Now that I’ve addressed the blatant lies and misconceptions concerning the bill, allow me to address the less outlandish claims of those who argue against health care reform.

Many opponents of health care reform, for instance, argue that health care will be rationed under the new health care plan. This is simply not true. The bill says nothing about rationing care, and this is merely a theoretical concern. But let’s have some perspective here: we already have rationed health care, and even death panels, to a degree. Under the current system of private, employer-based insurance, those without health care are the poor and the unemployed (who tend to have more health problems, on average) or those with pre-existing medical conditions. In essence, then, those who need health care the most, who are more likely to be sick or who are already sick, are denied health insurance. The current proposal would produce a public option for health insurance, allowing those who are unemployed, poor, or who have pre-existing conditions to finally have health insurance and receive adequate health care. No more would the “death panels” at private insurance companies, motivated by profits, pore over claims to seek reasons to deny paying for certain procedures, to deny claims outright, or to deny insurance to those who are already sick. These practices are heartless, immoral, and wrong, and anyone who would want to preserve such a system is out of their mind. A robust public option, on the other hand, could avoid these pitfalls by having a large national base for collecting money that would allow coverage of those who are poor or who have pre-existing conditions.

Many opponents of health care reform are fond of pointing out that government beauracracy would mismanage health care, would be very wasteful, and would ultimately make health care highly inefficient. This may or may not be true, but nevertheless, government is necessary for certain functions, whether it is wasteful or not. Few would suggest, for instance, that highways, the military, police, and so on should be privatized. That is because there would be conflicts of interest with the greater public and national good, as well as other problems. With roads and highways, for instance, privatization would require public funding, which would probably destroy commutes by producing endless toll roads that stop vehicles and create out of control traffic. The concerns are similar with health care, for the current system produces unethical profit motivations that deny care to those who need it most as a result of financial problems, as private insurance companies don’t generate enough money to handle these costs, whereas a government system would have a whole nation’s collective contributions to draw from, meaning less worry about unethically denying claims to control costs (though naturally some cost controls would have to be implemented).

Another interesting argument frequently offered tries to argue that the current plan isn’t much of a compromise between the conservatives and liberals, and would lead to a slippery slope of national health care without any private sector insurance. Under the current health care plan, the public option would be offered as an alternative to private insurance, and in essence the government insurance plan would be in direct competition with private insurers. However, the argument is that the government would soon overtake the private insurers, create a monopoly, and thereafter wreak havoc on the health care system.

What is interesting about this argument is that it conflicts with the a priori belief of conservatives that government-run systems are always ineffective and inefficient. If, for instance, the government is so inept, how exactly would it manage to overtake private insurance and monopolize the industry when directly competing? Shouldn’t conservatives be pleased that the free market would be deciding the winner? And if the government does win the batlle, doesn’t that just show that government insurance is better and should be adopted? As such, I don’t find these criticisms very convincing.

These are the arguments of those who oppose health care reform. Most of them are dangerous, uninformed, and silly, while others are simply wrong. But what can be done about the rampant spread of misinformation and ignorance? It seems as though the damage has already been done. A recent survey from Public Policy Polling, for instance, showed that 62% of Republicans believe the government should stay out of Medicare. This is a disturbing figure because Medicare is a government-run program. This is tantamount to having a majority of Republicans decrying government involvement in the Senate. (Keep the government out of my legislative body!) Such disgusting ignorance and idiocy, combined with the persistent fear of illusory death panels, is so absurd that it scarcely seems possible to address it in any reasonable manner. As such, I recommend the rhetorical tactic of congressman Barney Frank, who responds to a woman who claims Obama’s health care policy is somehow “Nazi” while holding a poster depicting Obama as Hitler by sarcastically asking her, “What planet are you from?” He then goes on to rip her to shreds, saying conversing with her is like talking to a dining room table, which is an insult to dining room tables everywhere, as I suspect the dining room table would be slightly more eloquent and less idiotic. When people make unreasonable, asinine, ideologically motivated, and downright dangerous claims, they can only be met with scorn, ridicule, and constant refutation backed by evidence. These charlatans do not deserve the respect of civil debate; they lost that privilege the moment they started loudly spouting outright lies, misinformation, and ridiculous clap-trap. With that said, I can only end my analysis of this supposed health care “debate” with the following remark: you’re wrong, you’ve been shown to be wrong, and now shut the fuck up.

Many people believe that the main difference between agnosticism and atheism is that atheism is dogmatic and closed-minded whereas agnosticism is more open and accepting. In reality, though, the difference between agnosticism and atheism isn’t a matter of degrees of certainty; the differences are primarily epistemological. The rowdy, unshakeable, dogmatic boisterousness associated with atheism is not a defining feature of the position, but is instead a persistent mischaracterization. In the olden days of yore, atheists were merely stereotyped as immoral, evil baby-eaters. Nowadays, we are characterized as arrogant and dogmatically certain immoral baby-eaters! This misguided stereotype must be put to rest, for we baby-eating atheists are actually quite moral and frequently embrace positions of fallibilism—the exact opposite of dogmatism!

Now, atheism is primarily seen as dogmatic because it assumes nonexistence given an absence of evidence. This is almost always the contentious point. An agnostic would assert that absence of evidence is not proof of absence, maintaining that asserting nonexistence without any evidence is an argument from ignorance. An atheist, on the other hand, finds it perfectly reasonable to conclude that something does not exist given an absence of any evidence. The atheist does not believe with certainty that God does not exist given the lack of evidence, only that this is more likely to imply that God does not exist. Thus, the point of contention between agnostics and atheists isn’t about certainty, but about whether nonexistence can be inferred from lacking evidence. As mentioned earlier, the dispute is mostly epistemological.

The problem is rather obvious. If something did not exist, we would expect to find no evidence of it, but even if the thing did exist we could expect to find no evidence of it, for the evidence could be hidden from us. Similarly, if I had no evidence that my dog could fly, and then argued, “But you have no evidence that my dog can’t fly!”, this would hardly be a convincing argument, as I’d be making the claim in the absence of any evidence, judging that my dog could fly from a position of complete ignorance.

These problems are not legitimate, and they pose no sort of barrier to professing atheism, though. While it is indeed an argument from ignorance to assert that my dog can fly in the absence of evidence, this is because a flying dog is the sort of thing that can be supported with evidence. If a dog could fly, we’d expect to find evidence of the dog zooming through the skies, perhaps dropping turd-shaped surprised on our heads. But the same is not true of nonexistence (particularly concerning the bit about shitting on one’s head from the sky). If something does not exist, would you expect the nonexistent thing to produce evidence of its nonexistence? Of course not. One would expect that the nonexistent thing would produce no evidence whatsoever. Thus, in the case of nonexistence, the absence of evidence is exactly what we’d expect to observe.

Nevertheless, it is true that we can never be certain that a thing does not exist, owing to the fact that we may merely be ignorant of the evidence. The agnostic is entirely correct to point this out. The problem, of course, is that atheists tend to take a pragmatic, fallibilistic epistemological approach, whereas agnostics seem tethered to the idea of an epistemology rooted in logical certainty. The atheist doesn’t care if his position is uncertain; he doesn’t necessarily demand logical certainty. All that matters is that the position fits the evidence better than other hypotheses. In the end, an agnostic who demands certainty from claims of nonexistence is demanding the unreasonable and the impossible.

Suppose, for instance, we apply the agnostic’s demand for certainty to positive claims. Most agnostics would accept that the theory of evolution adequately explains the origin of species and biological variation. Of course, the theory of evolution is open to the same sorts of criticisms that agnostics apply to atheism. For example, one can never be certain that the theory of evolution is true, because we could simply be ignorant of the evidence that falsifies it. The theory of evolution, also like atheism, is underdetermined by the data. The absence of evidence for God could be explained by our ignorance of the evidence; similarly, even given all the evidence for evolution, we can invent ad hoc explanations for our biological observations that also fit the data, such as, “God created organisms in such a way that they would appear evolved.” But the fact that we can apply different explanations to the data doesn’t call the theory of evolution into doubt, because these ad hoc explanations needlessly multiply explanatory entities, calling into existence a god-like entity when there is no additional evidence of such a being. The God explanation is also untestable, because even if we observed that nothing in biology supported evolution—there were no homologies, no vestigial parts, no transitional fossils, no progression of species through time in a linear fashion, etc.—we could still say, “God created life.” An omnipotent being could create life that apears to have evolved or appears to have not evolved. No matter what we observe, this explanation fits, and so it is a much poorer explanation than evolution. Evolution, on the other hand, fits the data perfectly, even though it could have been falsified at any moment, which shows that its fitting the data is surprising and highly unlikely—unless the theory were true! When creationism fits the data it is no big surprise, as it would explain any observation whatsoever, and hence finding observational support consistent with creationism is not all that surprising or unlikely.

Obviously, the situation is the same with claims of nonexistence. If something did not exist, we would expect it to produce no evidence, and this would be the only expectation. Now, it is true that the thing could exist and we could be ignorant of the evidence. So if the thing did exist, we could expect evidence of it, or we could expect it to be hidden and hide its evidence from view. Notice that, in this case, any observation is compatible with the thing existing. But only the absence of evidence is consistent with nonexistence. This shows that assuming nonexistence is most prudent. Not only is the prediction more exact, but it is also falsifiable. In that sense, the position of atheism is far from dogmatic. Instead, it is pragmatic—the atheist assumes nonexistence, but knows this position could be falsified so long as the theist produces legitimate evidence of God’s existence. To criticize atheism for its uncertainty is thus as silly as criticizing the theory of evolution for its uncertainty. What matters is that evolution assumes the least and fits the evidence best. Similarly, atheism assumes the least and fits the evidence (or lack thereof) best.

Suppose, though, that if God existed, we wouldn’t expect evidence of his existence. That is, suppose God was totally transcendant and unknowable. In this case, the atheist can’t argue that nonexistence is the most plausible hypothesis simply because it exactly predicts the absence of evidence. An unknowable, mystical, transcendant God would likewise predict only the absence of evidence.

At first blush, this appears to be a winning rejoinder. The problem in this case, though, is that professing belief in such a deity is to essentially profess a belief in nothing. If one believes that God is totally unknowable and mystical, then to say, “God exists” amounts to saying, “I-don’t-know-what exists.” The only reason an atheist cannot disbelieve in such a deity is because the theist has not bothered to even define it. It is as if the theist were saying, “Djklerhi exists!” and then, when asked to clarify, saying that Sjklerhi is uknowable and hence the theist can’t say anything more about it. How the theist knows an unknowable entity exists is also never explained. So while rendering the deity transcendant and mystical may avoid the criticism concerning the lack of evidence, it just runs into the criticism of incoherence, and thus this is really no threat to the position of pragmatic, fallibilistic atheism.

Because claiming nonexistence based solely on the absence of evidence is justified through fallibilistic epistemology, atheism is similarly justified. Of course, throughout this post I have assumed, for the sake of argument, that there is no evidence for or against God. This is, to put it mildly, a rather generous assumption. Those conceptions of gods as omnipotent and morally perfect, for instance, run into all kinds of logical difficulties concerning what it means to be all-powerful, whether this is consistent with the capacity to do no evil, and various other self-contradictions. Those conceptions of all-powerful, morally perfect gods who created the universe, physically interact with the world, and care about humanity are also problematic, as the existence of evil, the miniscule scale of humanity’s presence in such a vast universe, and the hostility of the natural environment to life all seem to be at odds with these conceptions of God. As such, the case for atheism is really much stronger than merely asserting, “There is no evidence for God!”, as there is in fact much evidence that implies various gods do not exist at all. But in the end even if there were no evidence for or against God, atheism would still be the most reasonable position, because epistemic fallibilism is a reasonable position, and because absence of evidence is more than adequate evidence for absence.