Won’t you please check out his collection at This is Historic Times, so he doesn’t kill me for reblogging his cartoon?

Initial increases in sales coincided with central banks slashing interest rates, and the Bank of England’s bailout of Northern Rock in September of 2007.  The following month, the book sold even more copies on the heels of the Bush administration’s announcement of a plan to encourage more lending to subprime borrowers.

More recently, the previous administration’s plan to purchase significant stakes in nine large banks as a part of the TARP program, and Obama’s stimulus package both seemed to provoke yet even more copies of the fictional story of John Galt to fly off the shelves.

So why the sudden interest?  I can understand – I read and enjoyed several of Rand’s books when I was in high school, and I even wrote an essay on “The Fountainhead” seeking money for college from the Ayn Rand Institute, a program they’re still running to this day.  It’s really kind of funny when you think about it; an institute that despises handouts and public education, and believes that “income inequality is good,”  is handing out thousands of dollars to help students suffering from the effects of income inequality to afford a higher education through a university that is either public, or most likely receives government funding.

Now, to be fair, I agree with a lot of what Alex Epstein has to say in that article about income inequality.  I completely understand that wealth is created, and that there isn’t a finite “pie” which is sliced up amongst the citizens of a nation.  I do not believe we should be striving for “income equality” – no one is saying that a janitor deserves the same wages as a brain surgeon – but I don’t think we can overlook the very real problems of a shrinking middle class and nearly stagnant wages for working people in the face of  more and more money being concentrated in the hands of a smaller and smaller group of wealthy elites.  The problem isn’t the existence of income inequality, it’s the fact that the disparity has been increasing.

The old meme is that “a rising tide lifts all boats,” and Epstein reinforces this basic idea behind trickle-down economics; “Further, the wealth creation of the richest Americans makes us far more productive and well-off.”  This idea has been now refuted twice in the history of our country in shocking form.

This chart shows percentage of total wealth held by the top 10% of income earners in the United States, 1913 – 2008.

The three different colored lines represent the top 1%, top 1-5% and top 5-10% of income earners holding pieces of the admittedly non-finite pie.

At the peak of income disparity in 1928, the top 10% of income earners held nearly 50% of the wealth of the nation, with almost 25% of that in the hands of the top 1%.  Cue the Great Depression.

Looking at 2008, the numbers are almost identical.  Cue the global financial crisis.

Epstein and his ilk rely too heavily on a mythical worldview, dreamt up in response to the extremes brought on by the Bolshevik revolution in Russia and projected upon the landscape of the American system.  Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism is interesting and not without merit, but we should be careful not to give too much credit the lessons of fictional stories – especially ones that demand total dedication to extreme ideas.

In Rand’s magnum opus “Atlas Shrugged,” the ultimate point of the story is played out in the last 90 pages in a 3+ hour speech in which hero John Galt calls for a union-style strike – but not one of those terrible collectivist workers’ strikes – this is a rich man’s strike.

The idea is that the real producers of wealth simply get tired of paying taxes on the fruits of their labor, so they just stop earning money in protest.  This “precipitates the ultimate collapse of American society,” as John-Galt-movement blog GoingJohnGalt.org describes it.  The tagline of that blog is “Loving this country enough to leave it / Loving this country enough to save it,” and apparently loving this country enough to precipitate its ultimate collapse by embracing the value of selfishness.

I could discuss the absurdity of claiming that, for example, someone making $150,000 a year won’t want to make $200,000 next year because – gasp! – $28.5k of that additional $50,000 in income will be taxed at an additional 5% above the previous $83k – $171k bracket, a take-home difference of about $1,400 less than if the higher tax bracket didn’t apply.  But we can all do math.

I’ll simply say this, in conclusion:

To all those John Galt wannabes out there, I officially call your bluff.  Quit your job, stop investing, and get the hell out of my way – because I’m moving onward and upward, regardless of the situation and without whining.  If you wish for a world where the “real producers of wealth” like the folks at AIG, Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers decide to just take their toys and go home, leaving the field open to the rest of us, by all means please show us you have the courage of your convictions.  Let me know how that works out for you.

“The plain fact is, religion must die for mankind to live.”

These are the words that herald the beginning of the end.

The end, that is, of Bill Maher’s Religulous, a 101-minute exploration of the absurdities and the terrors of religion as filtered through Maher’s unique lens.

Maher, who was raised Catholic (by a Catholic father and Jewish mother), has long since left the religious life and is not content to accept the quiet agnosticism of so many who have abandoned religious practice.  Rather, his declared atheism carries hints of the vehement anti-religiosity of Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens.

The film is at times hilarious, sometimes silly, occasionally a bit mean-spirited, and almost entirely thought-provoking.  Definitely all-around entertaining for our atheist friends, but it will likely be a harder pill to swallow for our Christian, Jewish and Muslim friends who are brave enough to face their own beliefs portrayed in such a way.  More so, because Bill isn’t just preaching to the choir here – he appears to be seeking converts.

Maher and his fellow “fundamentalist atheists” do not simply hate religion for petty reasons or want it to go away because it offends them.  They are making an impassioned plea for the soul, if you will, of humanity.  He continues;

“The hour is getting very late to be able to indulge in having key decisions made by religious people, by irrationalists, by those who would steer the ship of state not by a compass, but by the equivalent of reading the entrails of a chicken.

George Bush prayed a lot about Iraq, but he didn’t learn a lot about it.

Faith means making a virtue out of not thinking.  It’s nothing to brag about.  And those who preach faith and enable and elevate it are our intellectual slaveholders, keeping mankind in a bondage to fantasy and nonsense that has spawned and justified so much lunacy and destruction.”

It is difficult to argue with the logic here.  While many individuals can relate subjective stories for how religion has made their life better, while it surely brings comfort and fellowship to the lives of many who will never kill or injure another human being in the name of their god, the record of human history is undeniable.  No number of charities or good works can ever remove the bloodstains of the centuries’ worth of terrible actions.

Apologists like Dinesh D’Souza have pointed out, rightly, that religion is not the sole cause of a bloody and violent history.  The most prominent example of Joseph Stalin is often given as proof that institutional atheism can equal or even exceed the violence, terror and destruction of organized religions in human history.

But the concept of God isn’t the issue here.  The specific problem with religion is pinpointed:

“Religion is dangerous because it allows human beings, who don’t have all the answers, to think that they do.  Most people would think it’s wonderful when someone says, ‘I’m willing, Lord.  I’ll do whatever you want me to do.’  Except that since there are no gods actually talking to us, that void is filled in by people with their own corruptions, limitations and agendas.

And anyone who tells you they know – they just know what happens when you die, I promise you, you don’t.  How can I be so sure?  Because I don’t know, and you do not possess mental powers that I do not.

The only appropriate attitude for man to have about the big questions is not the arrogant certitude that is the hallmark of religion, but doubt, doubt is humble, and that’s what man needs to be, considering that human history is just a litany of getting shit dead wrong.”

It is my personal opinion that these 3 paragraphs serve as the most poignant argument possible in favor of the original thesis – that religion must die, in order for mankind to live.  To reply further to D’Souza’s point and begin to transcend the myopia of Maher’s point, they’ve both got this shit dead wrong.

Doubt is a virtue.  As Thomas Jefferson once said, “It is always better to have no ideas than false ones; to believe nothing, than to believe what is wrong.”

The 800 pound gorilla in the room isn’t faith, God/gods, or the structure of organized religion.  The problem is “arrogant certitude,” the lazy choice of accepting someone else’s beliefs “hook, line and sinker” so as to avoid life’s hard questions, and then having the balls to assert an absolute knowledge of the answers to those questions. It’s hiding behind the false piety of  saying “I don’t judge you, but God hates you.”

At a certain point, all religious people must recognize that their relationship with God is entirely unique to them, and what works for you doesn’t necessarily work for your neighbor.  And that includes the religion of atheism!  To our religious friends, “arrogant certitude” could aptly describe the attitude of Maher, Hitchens or Dawkins.  In fairness, on most points they have scientific facts to back them up, but while we can prove the earth is not 6,000 years old we cannot prove there is not some kind of “higher power.”

Faith is a virtue, in measure.  It takes a certain amount of faith to function; if we were constantly doubting the structural integrity of our houses, or the love of our family, or the approval of our employers, we would be constant nervous wrecks.  The problem arises when we equate ignorance with faith – as Maher put it, “Faith means making a virtue out of not thinking.”

God, gods, and religion have their place in civilization.  Religion is as much a part of culture as music, art, literature, cuisine or clothing – the ways we express ourselves, the ways we relate to each other and the world around us, and the ways we come to know ourselves.

Many of the founding fathers of this country were Deists.  They believed in a natural God who created the physical universe, and that religious truth was found by the direct application of reason and observation of the natural world, not by the revelations of another fallible person.

It was this wisdom, this strength to admit we don’t always have it right and the desire to know God directly for oneself through experiencing his creation that formed the spiritual foundation of our religious freedoms as well as our protections from religion.

Maher wraps up his case, then I do the same:

“This is why rational people, anti-religionists, must end their timidity and come out of the closet and assert themselves, and those who consider themselves only moderately religious really need to look in the mirror and realize that the solace and comfort that religion brings you actually comes at a terrible price.

If you belonged to a political party or a social club that was tied to as much bigotry, misogyny, homophobia,violence and sheer ignorance as religion is, you’d resign in protest.  To do otherwise is to be an enabler, a mafia wife, with the true devils of extremism that draw their legitimacy from the billions of their fellow travelers.

If the world does come to an end here or wherever, or if it limps into the future, decimated by the effects of a religion-inspired nuclear terrorism, let’s remember what the real problem was: that we learned how to precipitate mass death before we got past the neurological disorder of wishing for it.

That’s it.  Grow up or die.”

Maher’s final salvo hits hard, like an Israeli airstrike on the Gaza strip.

Which brings me to my final point.  Religulous deals almost exclusively with the Abrahamic monotheistic faiths – Judaism, Christianity and Islam.  Barring a quick aside to Amsterdam for the religion of pot-smoking, Maher deals only with the Big 3.

2 of these 3 religions, all from the same root, dominate the world today at a combined total of approximately 53% of the global population.  They all believe the end of the world is imminent, and the bloodshed will be of cosmic proportions when the true believers and the rest face off and fight it out on a dusty hill in modern day Israel.  Incidences of religiously-motivated violence outside of these 3 religions is virtually unheard of through human history.

On this point there can be no disagreement, no compromise.  If humanity is to survive, this terrible fantasy of epic violence must be abandoned.  No true god advocates murder, torture, willfull ignorance or subjugation, and the world will only come to an end if we let the extremists destroy it.

This study published today shows that more and more Americans are identifying as non-religious, non-denominational or simply spiritual.  Others are gravitating to new and alternative religions, or even creating their own religion.  There is hope that mankind can shed the old worn-out dogmas and dangerous beliefs without losing its connection to the divine.

Grow up or die, indeed.