I find it kind of strange that all those in Congress who are holding town meetings over the health care reform issue aren’t taking a more aggressive approach to the naysayers. It’s not like nobody knows what the talking points are, so why not come right out and nip it all in the bud with an opening statement?

We know key points from the dissenters are, they don’t want “Death Panels” deciding when to pull the plug on Grandma, they don’t want the government taking away their current insurance policies, they don’t want government run health care that will put the insurance companies out of business, and they don’t want abortion funded with taxpayer money.

Now anyone with a lick of common sense who knows what the current bills circulating Congress are including and excluding can honestly agree with these people. Nothing in these bills including any of those things.

So why not have the senators and representatives stand at the podium and announce they’d like to begin by making a statement about what they’re against? It could go something like this:

“Before we begin our discussion, I’d like to make a brief statement. I am vehemently and absolutely opposed to any health care reform that would bring about death panels, or would mandate which insurance policy a citizen must use, or would cripple the insurance industry and force them out of business. And, let me make this perfectly clear, I am definitely opposed to any reform that would use taxpayer money to fund abortions!

I will never, as long as I am a member of Congress, approve or vote for a bill that would include any of these things!”

It would seem to me, a statement that uses the pre-written script these dissenters come armed with, and agrees with them, would pretty much end the ruckus.

Wouldn’t you say?

Technorati Tags: Congress, dissenters, health care reform, town hall meetings

Robert Wright over at the Dish has a great conversation going about the “God Gene,” and how religion fits into society.

He writes:

The trouble is that the context of the biological evolution of human nature seems to have been hunter-gatherer societies. And certainly all the anthropological evidence suggests that religion had emerged in hunter-gatherer times, before the invention of agriculture. So I attribute the moral character of agrarian religion to cultural evolution, not biological evolution.

My take in all of this is, (and in many ways I agree with Robert’s take), the argument is omitting the real base of religion, namely the sense of the spiritual. If you add spirituality into the mix, then it can clearly be seen that in hunter-gatherer societies, a religious or spiritual occurrence would be more of a personal thing.

Now “spiritual” doesn’t necessarily mean something paranormal or supernatural. I mean it more in the way of the hormone-induced emotions one would feel when awed or inspired. In those times it wouldn’t take much to awe somebody, i.e. the poor fool who happened to be in the right place at the right time to see lightening strike a tree and produce fire.

Over time, these personal spiritual experiences may have been added to a collective and drawn upon by the community as a whole. This spiritual power then would come in handy as they moved more toward the agricultural, and thus needed something to protect their fields from both animal and human marauders.

In today’s societies, a sense of spiritual can still be felt in just about any experience from belonging to something with a clear path to success (religionism), to coming to the realization that we are basically alone and have the right to choose our own path (atheism).

But no matter what position we take, or where we draw our spiritual power from, its still a personal thing. Our leanings create our realities, and what awes us personally gives us the hormone-induced sense of the spiritual.

Who we choose to share this power with becomes our community and validation.

Technorati Tags: god gene, hunter-gatherer societies, Religion, spirit gene, spirituality