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I bought Sam Harris‘s book, ‘The End Of Faith‘ at Heathrow to annoy any fundamentalist religious terrorists I might have found myself sitting beside on the flight to the US. If the plane was going down, their last minutes would be spent enraged by the infidel, I thought.

It was a refreshing blast of a book. Dawkins, in his review, wrote ‘Even moderate religion is a menace, because it leads us to respect and “cherish the idea that certain fantastic propositions can be believed without evidence”‘.

Now Harris has brought out another book, ‘Letter to a Christian Nation‘, which promises more of the same but targetted more specifically at the US. Excellent, but I wonder if I’ll be able to read it in the UK now the religious incitement law’s here.

This latest Orwellian encroachment on freedom has just been applied in the manner its supporters claimed would never happen, by the police to threaten the Gay Police Association which claimed that a 74% increase in homophobic incidents was largely or solely motivated by religion.

Whether the figures are correct or not, a complaint from the Christian fruitcakes has resulted in police action and could end in a prosecution. As MediaWatchWatch says,
‘If this results in a prosecution, it will mean that it is illegal to suggest that religious belief can sometimes lead to violence.‘.

John Stuart Mill must be spinning like a top in his grave:

Mill argued that society may only legitimately regulate the conduct of individuals in order to prevent their inflicting harms on others. Crucially, he felt that offense did not constitute harm, and therefore he supported almost total freedom of speech.

John Stuart Mill,Wikiipedia

Not something I do, usually, but Maciej CegÅowski’s blog, Idlewords is so-o-o-o well-written I urge you all to leave here now and go there.

Once we drove into the Shenandoah National Park we joined the Skyline Drive south and east along the Appalachians to find a ranger centre where we planned to participate in typical American outdoor activities, short of shooting and skinning an elk.

Horse riding in the Shenandoah National Park

Helen’s been bothering me for years to try horseriding. I’d only been on the back of a horse once, in a Welsh youth camp, when several of us sat on placid ponies and were led around barn five times before we were allowed off for lunch. Horses had never been high on my list of things to do before I died but horseriding did seem to make sense in the States so we made our way to the stables, carefully avoiding the piles of horseshit everywhere and booked an afternoon horse trail. With a half-hour to wait we thought we’d walk through the woods and have a picnic.

If the word ‘park’ conjures up a picture of mown grass, trimmed hadges, perhaps a small pond and some swings, well, that’s not what US parks are like at all. In the US, the National Parks are enormous areas of wilderness with the occasional well-maintained and signposted path. Once you’ve driven through a ranger-operated pay-station and into the park you will be surrounded by tracts of untouched land harbouring all sorts of dangers. In Death Valley a couple of years ago, for instance, nobody stopped us from driving an unpaved desert road for thirty miles in 110° F. We didn’t see anybody else all day on the track and if we’d broken down we would have stood a fair chance of dying.

in Death Valley, 2004

So we walked off down the start of the trail and stepped into the woods to spread out the picnic blanket Helen had packed into our luggage and sat down with the sandwiches we’d bought. About ten minutes later I heard a noise to my left and looked up at two black bears running past, one chasing the other.

When you see a bear in a zoo you’re separated from it by an unscalable wall or an unswimmable moat, or some other means of stopping the bear from eating you. These two were about 30ft from where we sat, running quickly, with thin air between us. I don’t think they noticed us sitting on the rug. Once they’d crashed off into the forest I got to my feet, wondering what two bears might be running from. Another, larger bear, I thought. I made my way back to the path, heart thumping, and trembling with excitement. Helen sat happily waiting for another appearance.

According to Wikipedia’s list of fatal bear attacks, a woman was killed by a black bear not too far away from our encounter. Black bears don’t go in for pretending to attack you, to scare you off. They just attack you.

Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s home

I’d heard that Thomas Jefferson had a child with a black woman. When we visited his home, Monticello, we learned more about the story. I’ve been puzzling since how Jefferson could square his principles with his actions.

The man who wrote,

We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed, by their Creator, with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness

owned the second-largest number of slaves in Virginia and during his lifetime released to liberty only a few individuals, all members of the same family, all now said to be his own children. Their mother, Sally Hemmings, was a lifelong slave of Jefferson. Sally Hemmings herself is thought to be the half-sister of Jefferson’s wife. It seems slave masters having their way with their property was a local tradition.

The original draft of the Declaration of Independence included a passage about slavery:

He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither

which makes Jefferson’s slave-ownership all the more puzzling.

Too be charitable to him it might be he that he imagined the new country could not bear the struggle for independence and the abolition of slavery; he had, early in his career, failed to push through a bill of emancipation in Virginia and he was later successful in passing a law blocking the importation of slaves into the state.

In his public life he was clearly against slavery; but as a private landowner he was pleased to live off the proceeds of slave-labour, and worse. Molly Secours says of the relationship with Hemmings, for us to call it anything but ‘rape’ is disingenuous and dangerous and DeWayne Wickham wrote, to imply that the sex between him and his slave was consensual … is a cruelly dishonest portrayal of the dirtiest secret of American slavery

The claims of the Hemmings family were long pooh-poohed by academics and amateur historians alike until DNA evidence strongly supported the story that Jefferson himself was the father of Sally Hemmings’s children. That (white) historians rallied around Jefferson in the face of quite significant, although circumstantial, evidence despite the firm record of Jefferson’s dishonesty is tediously predictable. As a guide at Lincoln’s birthplace said to me when we discussed Lincoln and Jefferson, if Jefferson was around today he’d be paying maintenance for Sally Hemmings’s children.

Worse, though, now that most expert opinion accepts the Jefferson-Hemmings connection, is the reprehensible attitude of the Members of the Monticello Association (who claim descent from Jefferson), who have voted not to admit Hemings’s descendants.

The Monticello Association’s website claims to be studying the issues but is extremely misleading about the facts. For example, their ‘interim’ report produced in 2000 says,

Several eminent historians, including Dumas Malone, have examined the available facts and concluded that Thomas Jefferson was not the father of any of the Hemings children

but the DNA evidence was first obtained in 1998 whereas Dumas Malone, a biographer of Jefferson, died 12 years earlier, in 1986.

America’s need for heroic myths has obscured the the truth about the paternalist, bourgeois, contradictory gentlemen who signed the Declaration of Independence. As Dr Johnson said, of the country,

Slavery is now nowhere more patiently endured, than in countries once inhabited by the zealots of liberty

.

The Appalachians

The Washington Monument