Life Expectancy of the Palestinians

The World Bank's 2008 estimate of life expectancy in Israel was 81 years from birth. The estimate for life expectancy in the Palestinian Territories was 73.5 years.

This really surprised me when I read it. The life expectancy of Egypt was 70.1 years, and the life expectancy of Jordan was 72.7 years. I'm not saying that Egypt and Jordan are especially free and prosperous countries - current events show that these societies have their discontents. But a people buckling under the weight of apartheid are expected to live longer than their neighbors?

It very well may be that these figures are like this because the World Bank got them before Israel's galavant into Gaza. I say new estimates are past due.

It would be really neat to learn the differences between the life expectancy of residents of the West Bank and those of Gaza. My guess is that Gazans' life expectancy would be noticeably lower than that of their compatirots in the West Bank. Anyone with more recent estimates is welcome to give me a link.

Gun Control

I'm very concerned by ongoing calls to ban or strictly regulate the individual ownership of firearms, mostly because it betrays a pathological naivity on the part of most people making these calls (not to say that there aren't any naifs on the gun rights side).

Last night a lady stood before a reform Jewish congregation in Santa Monica and encouraged congregants and visitors to sign her petition to remove the gun show loop hole. She then said it was non-violent. I wonder if she thinks the officers enforcing that law will be armed. If they will be, well, there's a propensity for violence. Defensive violence, maybe, but it's still violence. And if we're going to allow for some defensive violence, why allow only one particular class to use it?

I always wonder if people who want to ban individual ownership of firearms want to also ban police and military ownership of firearms. That might be nice, if it were ever to happen. But it probably won't. Even in the UK, where the police don't cary firearms, there still are SWAT teams and other special units who do cary and use firearms, and there is a military, whose members - yes - cary firearms. To be fair, there are far fewer gun related deaths in the UK than there are in the US - something which I admit here.

There is one consequentialist consideration which I didn't mention in my earlier post, and that is disparities of power. The state has a much greater capacity to inflict lethal violence than its subjects do. Banning individual ownership of firearms exacerbates that power disparity. This doesn't always result in totalitarianism. Or rather I should say not every case has resulted in totalitarianism yet. What we can say is that the classic cases of totalitarianism (Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia) involved weapons control - or, what Anthony Gregory calls victim disarmament.

People who think the U.S. would be significantly different should take a hint from Oscar Grant, Waco, internment camps, and any other incident from that long list of abuses by the U.S. government. A government that abuses an armed populace can't be trusted to rule a disarmed populace. Of course, the biggest problem is that the government is too powerful to begin with. But until the government's destructive capacities are rolled back, and they never will be, I would say that individual residents of this country should be allowed to keep armor-piercing weapons (though, no, we hardly ever are allowed such a privilege).

Getting Saved

From a status update by a FB friend (and former heartbeat from when I was in 6th grade):

I believe in Jesus Christ and have accepted Him as my personal Savior. One FB user has challenged all believers to put this on their wall...In the Bible it says, if you deny me in front of your peers, I will deny you in front of my Father. This is...simple... If you love God and you are not afraid to show it, re-post this as I have.. :)

"Getting saved" is a funny thing to write about. Not because it takes a lot of gall and balls to talk about it with strangers and with people you know don't want to hear about it, but because "getting saved" involves accepting or affirming a very very large package of numerous specific beliefs.

First, and most obviously, you are to belive in God. Not just any god, but a God who has very specific things in mind for each human. This God wishes eternal happiness for each human, but also has set up a scheme where each human will likely be damned to eternal misery (which born again Christians can try to define as mere separation from God, but prefer instead to describe as a bottomless firey pit).

This has funny implications about justice. For just living a less than perfect life which would typically last no longer than 90 years, an unsaved human spends an eternity in hell, which again is usually described as a place of actual torment, and not mere separation from God. Accepting the solution offered by the God who put together this arrangement means accepting that it is just to punish someone with an eternity of torments for sins they committed in a less than 90 year life. Even if the person lived long and wickedly, with constant and cruel sin, the the gravity of the sin divided by the gravity of the punishment evens out to a big fat zero.

You are to believe that this place of eternal torment is the only possible place God can send you, and that places like - oh, purgatory - are simply not options that the omnipotent God will make available.

Included in the beliefs I mentioned above is a non-reincarnation, or linear, view of the afterlife and the world. You don't come back. Once you die you immediately go to where you're destined to go, or you stay in the ground until the trumpet blows, but you don't come back.

You are to believe that your wickedness which condemns you to an eternity of torments can be suddenly washed away (or covered up) by Jesus' death.

You are to believe that since you are so wicked, it is only by the grace of God that you can get saved, and that nothing you do can get you saved - unless of course we're talking about your act of praying to accept Jesus' death as a payment for your sins, since the sufficient grace of Jesus' payment is insufficient to cover you unless you accept it.

You are to believe that a life in awareness of Christ's payment does not constitute faith, that salvation requires the act of accepting Christ's payment, and that this act is not some inefficacious religious ritual or human effort that Paul refers to as a "work".

You are to believe that once you're saved, you're set, and that anything you do, no matter how bad, is covered. If for some reason you thought you were saved but incorrectly believed that you can loose your salvation, you should pray the sinner's prayer again one last time just to "make assurance" of your salvation. Or if after getting saved you committed a sin that is so grave it puts you in doubt of the authenticity of your salvation, you can pray the sinner's prayer again just to make for sure for sure.

All of this and much much more is to be conveyed in the couple minutes it takes to read the Roman's Road.

What Are the Scots?

Last night at a New Years party my gf asked me "What religion are the Scots? Anglican?" I said the largest group and the national church are (yes, groups are plural) the Church of Scotland, so the Scots "are" Presbyterian.

A summary of the religious identity of the Scottish people can be found here - again, at Wikipedia. At the 2001 census 65% of the Scottish population were some kind of Christian. The groups with the greatest number of people claiming some kind of allegiance to them were the Church of Scotland, with about 42% of the Scottish population, and the Roman Catholic Church, with about 16%. Since no denomination claims a majority of the Scottish people, I think it's unfair to say that "the Scots" as a single people "are" anything. (This seems even more true when we consider that the numbers we're talking about are nominal religious identities - what people merely claim to be - and not how they practice or whether or not their churches officially recognize them as practicing members of the church.)

Of course, by the same reasoning I can say that the English are not Anglican, since only 22.2% of the English people claim to be in the Church of England (the Church of England recognizes only 1.7 million as practicing members of the church).