Category Archives: Thinking

The Money Chronicles: Volume I

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I recently read a book about everyday finances called Stop Getting Ripped Off: Why Consumers Get Screwed, and How You Can Always Get a Fair Deal by Bob Sullivan that has me thinking. The premise of the book is that many of us don’t know much about simple arithmetic and we get ripped off by people who take advantage of that. I’m calling this series “The Money Chronicles” in the hopes that this will (like the Justice Chronicles) will become a recurring theme.

Virtually everyone I know borrows money in some form, be it a mortgage, a car loan, or a credit card. Very few people are going to let you use their money for free, and it makes sense to charge interest. If you borrow $100.00 at 10% interest and pay it back in a year, you’ll pay $110. Easy, right?

Well… It is, but like most debt it isn’t that clear cut. Because we’ve gotten used to phrases like “annual percentage rate” (APR), “revolving credit,” and “compounding interest,” we tend to sign up for a loan, pay the bill each month, and let somebody else do the math. In a world where everyone is virtuous that would be fine. I’m blogging about this because we don’t live in such a world and there are armies of people out there who are happy to advantage of us, and take our money.

I’m going to start with the place that most people first run into trouble: credit cards. I can’t tell you how many offers I get over the course of a year that promise me all sorts of stuff if I sign up for their card. They do everything they can to tell you that by signing this line you can enter a world of free money. Let’s see what happens with this card.

I’m going to use my current American Express bill as an example. My current balance is $1319.19, the interest rate (annual percentage rate or APR) is 15.24% and the minimum amount due is $28.00. If I pay off the entire balance (as I intend to), I pay no interest. As long as I do this, I’ll never pay a penny of interest.

But if I pay only the $28.00 and continue to pay only the minimum, and never use the card for new purchases it will take 12 years to pay it off and I’ll have ended up paying $2677.00. Better than that, if I make the payment even one day late I’ll be charged an additional $39.00 late fee.

If I spend the next 12 years paying off the card, I’ll be 61 years old when I’m done. In fairness I’ll have gotten the benefit of whatever I bought for the $1319.19, but the rest? The rest of the money ($1357.81) does nothing but make the credit card companies wealthier. And frankly, the 15.24% isn’t too bad. If my interest rate were 20%, I would need 23 years to pay it off and the total payoff amount would be $3722.00. In 23 years I’ll be 72 and will probably have no memory of what I bought in 2010.

There’s lots more, but there’s one thing I encourage you to do: buy Bob Sullivan’s book. One eye opener for me was how the credit cards use average daily balance and how you can save money by making large purchases toward the end of the month. If you do nothing else, read pages 84 to 89.

The Proper Role Of Religion (According to Me)

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A few years ago in my literary travels I came across Karen Armstrong. She is British, and was a nun in the 1960s. She left the convent and has done many things, but most importantly (for me) is that she is a terrific writer. I met her when she signed my copy of The Great Transformation: The Beginning of our Religious Traditions. She is creative, inviting, and challenging. I like that.

I recently finished her latest book The Case for God. I thoroughly enjoyed it, but had not thought about blogging about it until I read the epilogue. She states something I’ve felt for a long time, as well as I’ve ever read it expressed:

We have become used to thinking that religion should provide us with information. Is there a God? How did the world come into being? But this is a modern preoccupation. Religion was never supposed to provide answers to questions that lay within the reach of human reason. That was the role of logos [reason]. Religion’s task, closely allied to that of art, was to help us to live creatively, peacefully, and even joyously within realities for which there were no easy explanations and problems that we could not solve: mortality, pain, grief, despair, and outrage at the injustice and cruelty of life. Over the centuries people in all cultures discovered that by pushing their reasoning powers to the limit, stretching language to the end of its tether, and living as selflessly and compassionately as possible, they experienced a transcendence that enabled them to affirm their suffering with serenity and courage. Scientific rationality can tells us why we have cancer; it can even cure us of our disease. But it cannot assuage the terror, disappointment, and sorrow that come with the diagnosis, nor can it help us to die well. That is not within its competence. Religion will not work automatically, however; it requires a great deal of effort and cannot succeed if it is facile, false, idolatrous, or self-indulgent.

Frankly, I couldn’t say it any better. I find great frustration in the ways that religion gets misused these days. We use it manipulate behavior (“Do you think God is pleased with what you are doing?”), justify our actions (“God rejoices when an abortion doctor is murdered”), discriminate (“He looks like a good candidate for the job, but I worry that he doesn’t have a personal relationship with Jesus”), or rewrite history (“If the Bible says the world is only 6,000 years old, I don’t care about anything else: that’s what I believe”).

Too often we use faith and religion not to expand our world and increase compassion, but to exclude people we fear or justify our prejudices. That’s wrong. Our faith should not provide us an excuse to retreat into our fears, but a safe place to explore what scares us.

I pray that my faith makes me a better man; that it makes me more compassionate and understanding; that it makes my life more manageable and less fearful. I pray that my faith makes people of other religions respect and care for me, even if they don’t completely understand what I believe.

And I pray that Karen Armstrong keeps writing.

The Justice Chronicles: Volume I

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The recent events in Haiti have caused me to think a great deal about the role of justice. They suffered a 7.0 magnitude earthquake on January 12th and thousands lost their lives. Countless others survived but are in need of basic services (food, water, shelter, etc.) and that has lead to a very public debate.

Organizations like the Red Cross and Catholic Relief Services have raised millions of dollars. President Obama asked former presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush to spearhead a fundraising effort.

This raises lots of questions to me on the nature of justice and charity. In a previous post I spoke of medieval Jewish philosopher Moses Maimonmides (1120-1190) and his teaching on the “ladder of tzedakah.” Tzedakah is normally translated as “charity” but it means much more. In a sense, true tzedakah is not simply a rich person giving something to a poor person; it’s an act of fairness and justice, an act that works to restore all of us to equality.

More than that, the “ladder” part tells us that there are rungs, or levels; not all tzedakah is the same. Maimonmides taught that this ladder had 8 rungs:

1. Giving begrudgingly
2. Giving less that you should, but giving it cheerfully.
3. Giving after being asked
4. Giving before being asked
5. Giving when you do not know the recipient’s identity, but the recipient knows your identity
6. Giving when you know the recipient’s identity, but the recipient doesn’t know your identity
7. Giving when neither party knows the other’s identity
8. Enabling the recipient to become self-reliant

For most people who are giving to the relief in Haiti, it’s really the 7th rung. That’s pretty good particularly given that the people who will benefit from these donations will never have the opportunity to give back, but I wonder if we shouldn’t think more about moving to the 8th rung.

This may be too politically sensitive to discuss directly, so let me get to this at a slant. Going back a century, I think most people are aware of the name Andrew Carnegie (1835-1919). He founded United States Steel (now called USX). In building his empire he earned a phenomenal amount of money and when he retired he gave much of it away. In total, he donated approximately $350,000,000 and was instrumental in the building of over 2500 libraries. Even today the <a href="Carnegie Corporation is continuing Andrew’s vision.

Much of the work they do is 7th rung stuff. The people who fund the charity don’t know the people they help and they don’t know the donors. But when Mr. Carnegie was amassing his fortune, did he need to keep it all himself? Did his workers need to live in poverty and work in poor conditions so those of the next generation would have a library? In 1892 Carnegie broke the union that represented his workers. Had he worked with the union and given everyone a living wage, couldn’t that have been 8th rung tzedakah? Maybe Carnegie wouldn’t have been so famous, and maybe we wouldn’t have as many libraries, but workers in the late 19th and early 20th century might have had less poverty, disease, and shortened lives.

Maybe the earthquake in Haiti gives all the rest of us the opportunity to not only provide food and water, but also the tools to allow their economy to grow. Maybe this is our opportunity to make them better able to survive the next earthquake.

I entitled this “Volume 1” in the hopes that I’ll write about justice/tzedakah on a regular basis.

Here’s a Health Care Idea: Stop Trying to Live to Be 100

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Working for hospice for the past 12 years I’ve had the opportunity to see how we age in this country, and I keep coming back to a disturbing thought: in many ways our health care system is intended to keep people alive forever and in many cases we sacrifice quality of life for quantity of life.

Now, before you start making unkind comparisons between me and Jack Kevorkian let me assure you that I’m not talking about death panels and assisted suicide. I’m also willing to concede that long life sometimes goes hand in hand with good quality of life (my 91 year old father in law who still drives, sits on several boards, and plays bridge every Thursday is a case in point).

I’m also aware that average life expectancy in this country has grown from 46 years in 1900 to 76 years now. Vaccines, clean water, antibiotics and many other avenues of health care have given us this gift.

But we also see improved health care can cause us to live longer, but live sicker and we accept this because we are obsessed with living as long as we can. Look how much we cheer the centenarians that Willard Scott brings us on the Today Show. I love Willard but he shows these people looking good and talks about how everybody loves them. Just once I’d like to see him celebrate someone who has advanced dementia or has been bedridden for the past 5 years. Those centenarians never seem to get on the show.

I’m guessing that this obsession for living to be 100 is rooted in our fear of death. On one level that makes sense and we are often guided by fear more than anything else. But on another level, we need to stop fooling ourselves. The oldest documented person in the world was Jeanne Calment (1875-1997) who lived to be 122. And the death rate for all of us is the same: one per person.

The harsh truth is that no matter what we do, if we eat healthy, eschew alcohol and tobacco, exercise, moderate fat intake, whatever, we’re going to die. We can’t control that. We can, however, control how we live given the finite nature of our lives.

I think we need to rethink our goal. Instead of trying to live forever, or at least as long as we can, we should think about living well for the time we have. That sounds easy, but it’s not what we do. It means we have to acknowledge the point where it’s not working. For my part, here’s what I’ve decided:

  • I’m currently 49. On May 11th I turn 50. I acknowledge that I probably have more yesterdays than tomorrows.
  • If I make it to 80 I will have outlived half of my grandparents. At that point I will have ice cream for breakfast and stop caring what I eat.
  • I hope to retire at an age where we can enjoy our retirement. I don’t know if this is possible but if it is, I will accept the fact that I will have to live on a fixed budget for the rest of my life
  • I hope to travel but will accept that this may not be possible. If I never see Paris or Mongolia before I die, I will live with that fact.
  • I don’t want to spend my last years in a nursing home, but if it happens, I will make the best of it.
  • If the last years of my life are centered on caring for someone at the expense of my fulfillment, I accept that fact with grace and gratitude
  • None of us chooses the disease that takes our life. I pray that it is not ALS (Lou Geherig’s disease) or Alzheimer’s, but I accept that it may be a disease I wouldn’t choose.
  • I accept that at the end of my life I may need someone to do personal care for me. That means when I can no longer bathe or toilet myself, someone else will help me. I pray for the ability to accept this help without shame or embarrassment
  • I don’t want to live to be 100 unless I am reasonably healthy. If I am diagnosed with advanced cancer at age 90 I don’t want to spend the rest of my life in the hospital. If I choose not to undergo chemotherapy or radiation I hope my family can accept this.
  • Finally, I pray for the opportunity to die well: I hope my death will cause those who survive me to to find my death peaceful enough to not fear their own death. I hope my funeral is a joyful one where people can laugh and celebrate my life.

I can only imagine how strange this posts looks for most people, but accept it for what it is.

Uncle Joe: Couldn't You Spend Christmas With Us?

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This past year has been a tough one for my father’s side of the family. We lost two of my aunts, Aunt Freda and Aunt Lempi in the winter and spring. The day before Christmas Eve we leaned that my Uncle Joe died. He had congestive heart failure and squeezed a great deal of life out his body; as a matter of fact he died after climbing a flight of stairs. The good news is that his nephew John was with him and told us that Uncle Joe didn’t suffer.

Even though he had a long life it’s still tough to lose someone right around the holidays. His death gave this Christmas a tinge of sadness. It’s also hard when it’s winter in Massachusetts. Uncle Joe’s wake is starting as I write this (from sunny and warm San Diego) and the current temperature in Gardner, MA is 11° F. I doubt that most of his family will even be able to attend.

My father is the youngest of seven, and one of four surviving. As a group they’ve been blessed with length of years, if not always good health. Uncle Joe was a case in point. He’s had heart failure for a number of years and needed to be on oxygen for a long time. Had he lived a hundred years ago it’s pretty clear that he wouldn’t have lived this long, and I sometimes wonder if his extra years were a blessing to him. It was certainly good to see him on my infrequent visits to Gardner and I’ll certainly miss him when I’m there next but I think it’s a fair question whether our current state of health care has served him well.

This is probably grist for another post, but our health care system is good at keeping our hearts beating, and moderately good at pain relief. We are also good at providing equipment to keep us mobile (e.g. oxygen tanks, wheelchairs, etc.). But we’re not as good at helping people stay healthy and avoid getting sick. Well, more later.

Another Health Care Post

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The current Health Care Debate answers one of the critical needs in this country: how to provide protection to everyone (or nearly everyone). But there is another need: how to contain costs and make health care more efficient. We’re hearing more about how to provide health care to some of the 47 million people in this country without health insurance, but very little about how to make the system more efficient. Let me tackle these two separate issues one at a time.

The figure of 47 million without insurance comes from the census department and is from 2008. That translates to 20% of the US population under 65. There is nearly universal coverage for the population over 65 because of Medicare. Most Americans get health insurance from their work, or the work of someone in their household. Unfortunately that excludes people who are under 65 and not working, people who own their own business, and people who are not eligible to receive health insurance from their employers. These people daily live with the awareness that an accident or serious illness can have catastrophic effects. It’s true that if you are uninsured and are injured, the emergency room of any hospital is required to treat you regardless of ability to pay, but that’s a long way away from being cured. According to the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA) the hospital is required to treat a life threatening emergency until you are stable or can be transported somewhere else you can be treated. They are not required to treat a serious, but not life threatening, emergency and can “release” you once you are stable even if you life was in danger when you came in.

Now, whenever we liberals talk about expanding health coverage conservatives scream that government run health care would be a disaster. But the funny thing is that since 1966 we’ve had virtually universal, government run health care for those 65 or older. It’s called Medicare. I work with the elderly and to a person they like how Medicare is run. When you turn 65 you are eligible to enroll in Medicare, but not required. You are free to not enroll and find health insurance on your own. Funny that I don’t know anybody who has done that. It’s also funny that we have universal health care for the elderly (who vote in high numbers) but not children (who can’t vote).

But this misses my main point. We are not dealing with is the outrageous cost of health care and how poorly we ration it. Do not be fooled: we currently ration health care but we do it by coverage. If two 40 year old men are diagnosed with Type 2 Diabetes (formally called “Adult Onset Diabetes”) and only one of them has health insurance, their lives will become dramatically different. The one with health insurance almost certainly has access to medication (either oral or injectable), counseling to change your lifestyle, and methods to monitor your blood sugar level. The one without has none of this. The one without health insurance is looking at a dramatically shorter lifespan with the added benefits of possible blindness and gangrene in your feet.

The hard, cold reality is this: no matter what we do, we won’t ever be able to have everything we want as we want it as soon as we want it. We as a nation have to decide who will not receive all they want. Currently we ration by ability to pay (either privately or through insurance). I don’t believe this is the best way.

The further hard, cold reality is that no matter what we do, the death rate is still the same: one per person. We are all going to die one day and all the health care in the world isn’t going to stop that. The purpose of health care is not to allow us to live forever, but to allow us to live a good quality of life for as long as is practical. That said, there really does come a point where additional health care dollars are not doing that. For example, if a 95 year old man with terminal prostate cancer wishes to have aggressive chemotherapy treatment it probably doesn’t make sense. The chemo is likely to be unsuccessful, and even if it does stop the cancer, he is likely to be much sicker from the chemo. Even if the chemo is successful and doesn’t lead to additional bad side effects, he is still a 95 year old man who will likely die of something else within the next few years.

Under the current system, if he (or his family) demands aggressive treatment he will likely get it. His primary doctor can refuse to allow the chemotherapy but most doctors will go along with the patient or family if they are insistent enough. Also, if his heart stops beating (for any reason) the local paramedics will try through CPR to get it going again. Essentially there is little in the current system that will tell him it’s time to go. These are resources that are not being used to help people who will. The chemotherapy the 95 year old man receives takes away from the ability to provide preventative medicine for children and the poor. Unfortunately at this time there is nobody who is able to say no to the 95 year old man.

This isn’t about death panels. It is about recognizing that limited health care resources need to be allocated where they will do the most good for the most people. My father in law is 90 years old and is in good health. Recently I overhead a conversation he was having with a few friends. He was explaining that if there was a procedure that he needed and a 30 year old man needed the same procedure, the younger man should get it even if the younger man cannot pay for it. His friends were astonished and basically said that the 90 year old is entitled to whatever he can afford, and if the younger man can’t afford it, well that’s life. Frankly, I hope when I’m 90 I’ll have the same insight as my father in law.

At some point this discussion has to be part of our health care debate.

The Health Care Debate is Making Me Sick

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This is no surprise but when Barack Obama was elected President I was one of the people who was heartened. I believed (and still believe) that our country can once again be one that cares about all of its people, not just the ones with oil wells. His decision to tackle health care makes me feel that this may be the time we have real reform.

It’s cliché but true to say that our current health care system is broken. Most of us have health insurance and if we’re under 65 years old we get it from our employer (or the employer of the head of our household). Employer provided health insurance started as just another perk to attract good employees, but it’s become a huge problem. It’s a problem for a couple of reasons:

  • This is the easiest problem to understand, but if you lose your job, you lose your health insurance. At the time when you’re awash in worries about how to pay your bills, you now have to worry about getting sick or injured. It’s true that many people can take advantage of COBRA (Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act) but that means you need to pay the entire cost of the policy (where before your employer paid most of it) and it expires 1 1/2 years (18 months) after it starts.
  • If you work for someone who doesn’t offer health insurance, it can be difficult to get it. Your employer is not required to offer it, though most large employers do for full time employees. But if you’re part time, if you work for a small company, or if your boss is a cheap bastard, you’re out of luck. You need to find insurance on your own.

I’ll admit to this, but I don’t have much sympathy for the insurance companies. They have to negotiate with large companies for big volume, but if you’re looking for individual coverage you have no way to negotiate. Not only do you pay big bucks for limited coverage, they can drop you for just about anything. And they can do it retroactively (this is called “recision”). Don’t believe me? Ask Robin Beaton. She is a retired nurse who was diagnosed with breast cancer in June 2008 and needed a double mastectomy. Her insurer, Blue Cross approved the surgery, but days before the surgery they informed her that they weren’t going to pay for the surgery because she had a preexisting condition that she hadn’t disclosed. Turns out she had seen a dermatologist for acne and Blue Cross interpreted this as precancerous (teens all over the world may panic now). Since she “already had cancer” they weren’t going to pay for the mastectomy. Through the intervention of her congressman she was able to have the surgery 4 months later when the size of the tumor increased 2 to 3 centimeters. You can read more about this at Salon.com and CNN.

I knew when President Obama started talking about health care there would be some pushback from the Republicans but I can’t believe what I’m hearing. To quote Lily Tomlin, “No matter how cynical you get, it’s impossible to keep up.” Here are some highlights:

  • Sarah Palin: Seniors and the disabled “will have to stand in front of Obama’s ‘death panel’ so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their ‘level of productivity in society,’ whether they are worthy of health care.”
  • The Club for Growth: The health care reform plan would set limits similar to the “socialized” system in Britain, where people are allowed to die if their treatment would cost more than $22,000.
  • Rush Limbaugh (7 August 2009): It’s right out of Adolph Hitler’s playbook.

There’s more but this gives you a flavor. The reality is that President Obama, and many of us, simply wish to provide adequate health care to all Americans. We don’t wish to devalue or decrease the health care of people who already benefit, but expand it to those who don’t. In the 1960s these same forces opposed Medicare calling it “socialized medicine,” but today it would be hard to find someone on Medicare who thinks he’d be better off without it.

Stop believing the lies of those who want to nothing else but to scare you.

Goodbye Michael

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So earlier today there was a funeral in Los Angeles; maybe you heard something about it. Michael Jackson, who died on June 25th, was laid to rest today in Forest Lawn Cemetery after a memorial service at the Staples Center.

It was a landmark event that marked the end of a brilliant but tragic life. Even people who didn’t like Michael have to admit he was a boy and man with incredible talent and genius for what would entertain people. I have to confess that my iPod has a few of his songs and I still enjoy listening to them. He was one of a kind.

Unfortunately he was also tortured by the very talent that made him famous. Much like his former father in law, Elvis Presley he appeared to use great quantities of pain killers to try to cure his emotional and spiritual pain. Elvis died at 42 and Michael at 50, and fans of both try to pass their deaths off as heart attacks.

I believe that the tragedy in Michael’s life is that he didn’t love himself as much as his fans loved him. It all seemed to work as long as he was the talented, youngest member of the Jackson 5. He was young, black, and very talented. But as he grew up he somehow became uncomfortable with the idea of being a black man. In the 1990s his skin began to turn white; he claimed he suffered from a condition called Vitiligo, a condition where patches of skin have no melanin and appear lighter than the rest. Most people of African descent either live with it or find ways to make the patches appear darker. Michael claimed that he lightened the rest of his skin to match the patches. Many health professionals doubt he ever had Vitiligo, and even those who believe him think he made a poor choice in how to treat it. It is generally assumed that he wanted to be white and “bleached” his skin to make him look white.

He also didn’t want to grow up. I personally don’t get this (and am much happier as an adult) but he embraced the innocence of being an eternal child. This ended up being the most controversial part of his life as he built a life around his own imagined childhood: a ranch he called Neverland from Peter Pan. He surrounded himself with children who he saw as playmates. Unfortunately the rest of the world saw these children as victims and him as a pedophile. His claims that they shared his bed as “innocent fun” sickened most of us and gave him a label he never fully understood.

I pray that in death he finally achieve the peace that eluded him in this life.

Goodbye Michael.

Caperton v. Massey: How Could Four Justices Side with Massey?

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OK, I’ll confess a bias: When I was in high school I dreamed of being a lawyer. I liked the idea of argumentation and found that I think like a lawyer. I was cured of this desire when I joined the debate team at George Mason University. I learned that very little time is actually spent in argumentation: most time is spent in libraries going through endless articles and most argumentation is not finding the best argument but rather in burying your opponent in tons of words (with little regard to efficacy).

In any case I still enjoy following how courts rule on different issues and I confess to a dream of someday meeting NPR’s Nina Totenberg. A few days ago I was listening to NPR about the Supreme Court’s recent decision in the case of Caperton v. Massey. Here are the facts of the case:

  • In 1998 Hugh Caperton (President of Harman Coal Company) sued the Massey Energy in West Virginia, claiming they were using fraudulent business practices to run him out of business. In 2002 a jury in Boone County, West Virginia agreed and awarded Caperton the sum of $50 million.
  • Not surprisingly, Massey Energy appealed and the case began to wend its way up through the courts. During this time (in 2004) West Virginia Judge Warren McGraw was running for reelection as a judge in the West Virginia State Court of Appeals. Massey’s CEO was Don Blankenship and he began to campaign against Judge McGraw. I’ve been reading articles on this case and I can’t find any previous relationship between Don Blankenship and Judge Warren McGraw.
  • In any case, Don Blankenship began to back another candidate, Brent Benjamin, for the office. In fairness, Blankenship had given money to political campaigns before, but the sums were small. With Benjamin running for office, however, he donated $3 million
  • The campaign against McGraw turned ugly: a web page called …and for the sake of the kids accused McGraw of voting “to let a child-rapist out of prison, and court records show the plan called for the rapist to work at a local school.” Not surprisingly, Brent Benjamin wins the election and gains a seat on the West Virginia Court of Apppeals.
  • Drum roll everyone: the case of Caperton v. Massey came before the court. The lawyers for Hugh Caperton asked Judge Benjamin to recuse himself as his position was due in large part to the generosity of the defendant, Don Blankenship. He refuses.
  • Another drum roll: The court reversed the decision by a 3-2 vote with Judge Benjamin voting for the majority.
  • Final drum roll: Hugh Caperton continues to appeal, arguing that Judge Benjamin is biased and should have recused himself. Eventually it reaches the Supreme Court who agrees to accept the case.

Now it becomes news. The Supreme Court finds that there is always going to be a fuzzy line with elected judges, but wherever the line falls, this is way beyond it. In the 5-4 majority opinion, Justice Anthony Kennedy ruled that Justice Benjamin should have recused himself: “Just as no man is allowed to be a judge in his own cause, similar fears of bias can arise when — without the consent of the other parties — a man chooses the judge in his own cause.” The opinion recognized that there may some fuzziness and there may need to be other rulings but this case was too far over the line.

The minority opinion used what I call the “Pandora’s Box” rational. Chief Justice John Roberts based his opinion on the fear of where this might go. Would Justice Benjamin have to recuse himself if the contributions were smaller? etc.

This clearly will begin an increase in litigation over judicial bias but I don’t necessarily think that’s a bad thing. The election of judges opens the door to all sorts of questions and the fact that it can’t be settled in one case doesn’t mean it isn’t worth doing.

Want to Join Me in Starting the "Galileo Award?"

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For a long time I’ve toyed with the idea of starting a web page that annually awards the dumbest teaching or ruling from the Catholic Church that year. The obvious reason for the name is the way the 17th Century Catholic Church treated Galileo Galilei (1564-1642).

Galileo (and Nicolas Copernicus before him) challenged the theory that the sun revolved around the earth. As a reward for his scientific work the Church denounced him, ordered him to recant, and held him under house arrest. The Church argued that he must be wrong because Psalm 93:1 states: “Yea, the world is established; it shall never be moved.” Also, Psalm 104:5 says: “[God] didst set the earth on its foundations, so that it shall never be shaken.” Finally, Ecclesiastes 1:5 states: “The sun rises and the sun goes down, and hastens to the place where it rises.” [Quotations are from the Revised Standard Version Bible]

Now, in fairness, there has been some progress since 1633. In 1943 Pope Pius XII wrote the encyclical Divino Afflante Spiritu which essentially stated that the Catholic Church is not fundamentalist in reading Scripture. And in 1992 Pope John Paul II announced that Galileo was correct; this is particularly inspiring as it came only 23 years after the moon landing.

And while the Church now acknowledges Galileo was right, and while I still find great joy and love in being Catholic, she continues to make occasional stupid and senseless rulings. Catholics of my generation remember well the 1968 encyclical On Human Life, better known as Humanae Vitae that created great pain for young married couples. Other notables are the 1992 document from the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith (aka the Office of the Inquisition) that allows for discrimination against our gay brothers and sisters and Vatican’s support of those who demanded that Terry Shiavo be kept alive long after it was clear that it was time to say goodbye to her.

The event that finally moved to me throw this suggestion to the cyberworld is the latest publication from the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops on Reiki. For the unaware, Reiki is a spiritual practice that has been adopted for healing. Reiki practitioners use energy practices on people who are experiencing illness or pain, and we use this at San Diego Hospice where I work. I have to confess that I don’t fully understand how it works, but I also don’t understand acupuncture, aroma therapy, or a host of other alternative therapies. In any case, our bishops have decided that reiki is really about attacking faith and they have condemned it as being unscientific. Hard to imagine what Galileo is thinking about that. You can download the PDF on their ruling here.

In any case, this is my first nominee for 2009. I suggest the award be given on January 8th, the anniversary of Galileo’s death. This conforms to Catholic tradition where a saint’s day is determined by the date of his death, or in other words, his birth into Heaven.

Let me know what you think.