Freethought of the Day

Thomas Hobbes April 5 On this date in 1588, Thomas Hobbes was born prematurely  on "Good Friday" in England, his birth precipitated by his  mother's fear of the invasion of the Spanish Armada.  Thomas was the precocious son of a ne'er-do-well parson.  As a tutor, Hobbes made the "Grand Tour" of Europe three  times, once meeting Galileo. Contemporary  John Aubrey described Hobbes as "contemplative," and charitable, always carrying a pen and ink-horn in his cane,  with a notebook handy so he could jot down ideas during  daily constitutionals. Aubrey noted that Hobbes once wrote  a poem in Latin hexameter and pentameter "on the encroachments of the clergy on the civil power," which contained over 500 verses. De Cive was published in 1642, and Leviathan in 1651, in which Hobbes proposed the idea  that a "social contract" was necessary for civil peace. Its analysis of religion brought charges of atheism, then punishable by death. When things got too hot in England after Leviathan, Hobbes repaired to Paris. After the Great Plague in 1665 was followed by the Great Fire the next year, religionists sought a scapegoat. Parliament once more targeted Leviathan for being heresy. Hobbes hastily burned many of his papers. His writing helped give birth to the Enlightenment, by analyzing and questioning religious assumptions, and proposing that religion was created by humans. Hobbes attributed "opinion of ghosts, ignorance of second causes, devotion towards what men fear, and taking of things casual for prognostics, consisteth the natural seed of religion; which, by reason of the different fancies, judgements, and passions of several men, hath grown up into ceremonies so different that those which are used by one man are for the most part ridiculous to the other." Whether Deist, or covert atheist, Hobbes was anti-clerical, anti-Puritan and anti-Catholic, and managed to live out his full 91 years in perilous times due to influential friends. D. 1679. “Seeing there are no signs nor fruit of religion but in man only, there is no cause to doubt but that the seed of religion is also only in man. . .”  “Fear of power invisible, feigned by the mind or imagined from tales publicly allowed, RELIGION; not allowed, SUPERSTITION.”  “They that approve a private opinion, call it opinion; but they that mislike it, heresy; and yet heresy signifies no more than private opinion.” Compiled by Eleanor Wroblewski

Gun Insurance: A few Free Thoughts

A few ruminations on the problem of a society generously supplied with homicidal people with guns, and what to do about it.In addition to the various measures currently under consideration (bans on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, closing background check loopholes, etc), we could require that, without exception of any kind, each gun in America must be insured in the name of its owner. A few specifics:
1. Insurers may sell any policy they like(subject to each state’s insurance regulations), but the minimum standard policy must include the following:
2. A person injured accidentally by the insured gun, whether by the insured or another, would be compensated according to a grizzly schedule of benefits such as is common with life and accident policies: certain amounts for the loss of various body parts, certain amounts for various levels of disability, certain amounts for various levels of disfigurement, and so forth. In addition, ordinary and necessary medical expenses would be covered. Other health insurance would be then secondary.
3. The beneficiary of a person who died of his or her injuries would receive a specified standard death benefit.
4. All of the benefit amounts would be multiplied dramatically (perhaps ten times) if the injury or death was the result of an intentional act.
5. Except for medical expenses, there would be no recovery if the person injured or killed was related, by birth or marriage, to the insured. (The degree of relatedness would have to be established.) This would prevent an insured from killing a spouse and then himself, for example, in order to confer financial benefit on his children. (Of course, he could obtain life insurance and then wait beyond the suicide exclusion period to act, but that is a different issue.)
6. Except for medical expenses, there would be no recovery if the injury or death was the result of the gun owner’s (or another’s) legally correct actions in defense of himself or others, or of his home. If these or similar measures were in place, insurance companies would be doing society’s work for us by rating those who
sought insurance, just as auto insurers presently do drivers. A driver with a bad enough record cannot obtain insurance, perhaps at any price, and so can drive only at the continuous risk of serious criminal consequences.Over time,more and more uninsured guns (including those uninsured because their owners are uninsurable) would be discovered and confiscated,while responsible gun owners would enjoy very modest rates.It might even be possible to provide by law that a gun owner who met certain criteria (no violent crime, no adjudicated mental problems, above a certain age, no restraining orders, sufficiently secure gun storage, passed a safety course, etc.) would be entitled to get his or her base policy for a certain specified(modest) annual premium. If the gun were kept at all times at a licensed gun club or shoot-
ing range, the premium would be even lower. On the other hand, it would be announced in advance that, after some specific period of time, a factor in rating an insured would be whether he or she had ever been discovered to have an uninsured gun. Insurance companies would presumably require guns kept at home to be secured in specified ways, and guns to be kept at the ready (for example, in businesses) would command a higher premium. They would probably also increase premiums for owners who purchased more than a moderate amount of ammunition per year, perhaps excluding that purchased and used at a licensed gun club or firing range.
Such a measure may turn out to have the full-throated support of the insurance industry (lots of new customers!).In all likelihood, some companies would decide simply to incorporate it as part of the liability provisions in their homeowners’ policies.
The mere existence of this sort of program could be expected to have a favorable impact on health care costs in America, since some proportion of those injured with guns today, many fatally, have neither money nor health insurance, and therefore impose a cost on the society at large which could be partially offset by this insurance. There is already lots of precedent for this sort of requirement in modern American society. We have long required insurance for our cars,motorcycles and aircraft, and an increasing number of states now require it for motorboats.
Furthermore, since the premiums for very responsible gun owners should be quite modest, the gun lobby might come to see it as an “it could be worse” outcome. In fact, the gun industry might view it as a revenue opportunity and try to get licensed to sell insurance themselves. And on a different note, we need (in addition to a noexceptions comprehensive background requirement, of course) an obligation on the part of every gun owner (leaving aside the issues of insurance and registration)to report to the local police in writing, within 4 hours of its discovery, the loss or theft of
any gun.
Would these measures eliminate the shootings that have so many people wondering whether they live in an acceptably civilized country, capable of governing itself in ways that provide for a secure and orderly society? No. Would they reduce the problem? Absolutely. Is there any excuse for not enacting them? None.

Joque Soskis  is a humanist, retired attorney, retired professor of criminal justice and a former law enforcement officer. This article was published first in the Feb 2013 newsletter of http://firstcoastfreethoughtsociety.org  FB:https://www.facebook.com/joque.soskis?ref=ts&fref=ts

Freethought of the Day

Martin Luther King, Jr. January 15 On this date in 1929, Martin Luther King, Jr., was born. The civil rights leader, Baptist minister and founder of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference believed in a strict separation of church and state. Although his many speeches are peppered with references to Jesus and God and often depend for the force of their authority upon "the natural law of God," the Rev. King knew that the religious status quo tended to support segregation. In his famous "Letter from Birmingham Jail," dated April 16, 1963, King revealed his pique at continued criticism of the civil rights movement by clergy, pointing out that Sunday morning is the most segregated hour in the country. D. 1968. “In the midst of blatant injustices inflicted upon the Negro, I have watched white churches stand on the sideline and merely mouth pious irrelevancies and sanctimonious trivialities. . . . [H]ere we are moving toward the exit of the twentieth century with a religious community largely adjusted to the status quo, standing as a tail light behind other community agencies rather than a headlight leading men to higher levels of justice. . . . The contemporary Church is so often a weak, ineffectual voice with an uncertain sound. It is so often the arch-supporter of the status quo. . . Is organized religion too inextricably bound to the status quo to save our nation and the world?” —Martin Luther King, Jr., "Letter from Birmingham Jail," 1963

Moliere January 15 On this date in 1622, playwright and poet Jean Baptiste Poquelin, who adopted the stage name Moliere as an actor, was born in Paris. His father was an upholsterer/valet to the king. Jean Baptiste studied philosophy in college, started a Parisian acting troupe and toured the provinces with it for many years, acting, directing and writing. As a favorite of King Louis XIV, he produced a succession of 12 popular comedies still being performed, including "The School for Wives" (1662), "Don Juan" (1665), "Le Misanthrope" (1666), and "Tartuffe" (1667), all irreverent and increasingly irreligious. "Tartuffe," a satire on religiosity, originally featured a hypocritical priest. Although Moliere rewrote Tartuffe's profession to avoid scandal, some religious officials nevertheless called for Moliere to be burned alive as punishment for his impiety. Moliere was excommunicated in 1667. He married actress Armande Bejart, when she was 19, and they had one daughter, Esprit-Madeleine, in 1665. Becoming ill while playing the lead in his play, "The Imaginary Invalid" (1673), Moliere insisted on finishing the show, after which he died. Catholic officials refused to officiate or formally bury Moliere. It took the intervention of the King to get him interred under cover of night at a cemetery reserved for suicides. D. 1673. " . . . there is nothing, I think, so odious as the whitewashed outside of a specious zeal; as those downright imposters, those bigots whose sacrilegious and deceitful grimaces impose on others with impunity, and who trifle as they like with all that mankind holds sacred; those men who, wholly given to mercenary ends, trade upon godliness, and would purchase honour and reputation at the cost of hypocritical looks and affected groans; who, seized with strange ardour, make use of the next world to secure their fortune in this; who, with great affectation and many prayers, daily preach solitude and retirement while they themselves live at Court; who know how to reconcile their zeal with their vices; who are passionate, revengeful, faithless, full of deceit, and who, to work the destruction of a fellow-man, insolently cover their fierce resentment with the cause of Heaven." —Moliere, monolog by Cleante, Tartuffe (1667)

Freethought of the Day

Queen Silver December 13, 2011 On this date in 1910, "girl philosopher" Queen Silver  was born in Portland, Oregon, where her mother,  Grace Verne Silver, 21, a Socialist lecturer, was  stranded during a tour. At 10 days old, Queen took  the first of countless railway journeys with her mother.  The pair settled in Los Angeles. Starting in 1917, they  and Queen's stepfather became extras in motion pictures to supplement income. Queen  was taught at home and was expected at an early age  to be independent, to pay her own board and even cook her own meals. "The precocious child is the normal child," Grace believed. Queen was reading Darwin and Haeckel at 7. At age 8 she delivered a series of lectures in Los Angeles, on topics including "From Star to Man." Queen delivered them extemporaneously from notes as her mother illustrated them with stereopticon views, an event noteworthy enough to be covered by the Los Angeles Record. At  age 11, Queen publicly challenged William Jennings Bryan to a debate on evolution. Bryan declined. The Daily News in Inglewood carried a front-page article on June 29, 1925, reporting that "Inglewood's famous girl philosopher, talker and writer" might attend the Scopes trial and, which pictured Queen holding a chimpanzee. Queen  was unable to afford the trip but 1,000 of her pamphlets were distributed during  the trial. From 1923-1934, she published "Queen Silver's Magazine," a 16-page periodical with a freethought angle and a national subscription. During the Depression, Queen took seasonal office work. Starting in 1936, she became a junior typist clerk. Attending night school, she graduated from Los Angeles City College in the 1960s  with an associate degree in arts. She stayed in state civil service, working as a court reporter, and retired in 1972. She helped to found the Los Angeles group that later became Atheists United, serving on its board, and lecturing occasionally. She was a member of many freethought and humanist organizations, including the Freedom  From Religion Foundation. Wendy McElroy published a biography, Godless Girl, after Queen's death. D. 1998. “The greatest contribution nonbelievers have made to the world has been the Constitution of the United States. Consider how very heretical to a religious world was the idea of a Constitution predicated on 'We, the People.' ” — Queen Silver, "Humanity's Gain from Unbelief," a speech delivered in her 80s and whose title was borrowed from 19th century freethinker Charles Bradlaugh. See Women Without Superstition and http://www.zetetics.com/queen/