Star Trek Is Not Socialist

From FEE.org:

Star Trek presents the idea of a better future for humanity. But it’s because of technological advances rather than redistributive government policies. It’s a future where most needs and wants are no longer scarce and can be easily provided for. But, most important of all, it’s a future that protects the rights of the individual rather than bulldozing them at the whim of politicians who arbitrarily decide what’s best for the community. Individual freedom is the foundation of the Federation’s values. [read more]

The author goes on to say in the Star Trek universe scarcity is almost gone. Almost is the key word because there is certain things the replicator cannot replicate.  Other instances of capitalism rather than socialism:

• In Star Trek, Earth and the United Federation of Planets protect the rights of people and businesses.
• The twelfth guarantee covers intellectual property rights and establishes an artist as the person who created an original artistic work (ST: Voyager later has those rights expanded to holograms in the episode “Author, Author”).
• In Star Trek 3, McCoy tries to hire a smuggler with a ship and pay him with money. We also see that genuine antiques are an item people want and cannot replicate because it won’t be the real thing, such as in the DS9episode “In the Cards,” when a 1951 Willie Mays mint condition baseball card is up for auction and latinum (this like gold—it cannot be replicated) is the only payment accepted.

The Worst Enemy of Black People

By Walter E. Williams on The Daily Signal.com:

Many black Americans have great respect for Malcolm X. Many schools bear his name, and many streets have been renamed in honor of him, both at home and abroad. But while black Americans honor Malcolm X, one of his basic teachings goes largely ignored. I think it’s an important lesson, so I will quote a large part of it.

Malcolm X said:

The worst enemy that the Negro have is this white man that runs around here drooling at the mouth professing to love Negros and calling himself a liberal, and it is following these white liberals that has perpetuated problems that Negros have. If the Negro wasn’t taken, tricked or deceived by the white liberal, then Negros would get together and solve our own problems. I only cite these things to show you that in America, the history of the white liberal has been nothing but a series of trickery designed to make Negros think that the white liberal was going to solve our problems. Our problems will never be solved by the white man.

There’s a historical tidbit that those much younger than I (almost 83 years old) are ignorant of. In black history, we have been called—and called ourselves—several different names. Among the more respectable have been “colored,” “Negro,” “black,” “Afro-American,” and “African-American.”

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Malcolm X was absolutely right about our finding solutions to our own problems. The most devastating problems that black people face today have absolutely nothing to do with our history of slavery and discrimination. Chief among them is the breakdown of the black family, wherein 75 percent of blacks are born to single, often young, mothers. In some cities and neighborhoods, the percentage of out-of-wedlock births is over 80.

Actually, “breakdown” is the wrong term; the black family doesn’t form in the first place. This is entirely new among blacks.

According to the 1938 Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, that year only 11 percent of black children were born to unwed mothers. As late as 1950, female-headed households constituted only 18 percent of the black population. Today it’s close to 70 percent.

In much earlier times, during the late 1800s, there were only slight differences between the black family structure and those of other ethnic groups. In New York City in 1925, 85 percent of kin-related black households were two-parent households. Welfare has encouraged young women to have children out of wedlock. The social stigma once associated with unwed pregnancy is all but gone.  [read more]

But the Left (notice Malcom X said white liberals as in the new liberals or if you prefer the progressives) will continue to believe that black people (and other minorities for that matter) cannot live without them.

House Democratic Rules Package Could Mean More Spending, Higher Taxes

From Daily Signal.com (Jan. 2):

Rather than promoting fiscal restraint, the House is considering rules changes that would move in the opposite direction. The results could mean more deficit spending and higher taxes for many Americans.

Here are four proposed rules changes the House should reconsider.

1. Adoption of a “Gephardt rule,” which would allow the House to avoid a direct vote on the debt limit.

Under this rule, a vote on a House budget resolution would double as a vote to raise the debt limit in the House. In early 2019, we are likely to hit a debt of $22 trillion. Americans deserve a true stand-alone vote on the debt limit in both chambers of Congress.

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2. Eliminating dynamic scoring.

The proposed rules package would eliminate a requirement that major legislation take into account the economic impact of the policy changes it contains. The official score of how tax legislation affects revenue would no longer take into account how policy changes affect the way people, businesses, investors, and entrepreneurs alter their behavior in response.

This would deny the widely accepted reality that government policy can and does change people’s behavior and affect the economy. In essence, it would allow Congress to ignore the negative effects of its own policies.

Getting rid of dynamic scoring would make it easier for Congress to raise taxes on all Americans. Lawmakers would be able to pretend that higher tax rates will bring in lots of new revenue, while denying the negative effects of a slower economy.

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3. Removing supermajority protection against tax increases.

The proposed House rules would strike the requirement that a supermajority of three-fifths of Congress vote to increase taxes on the American people. Without this protection, the House would be able to more easily increase income taxes, endangering the tax cuts passed a year ago.

4. Allowing amendments to appropriations bills that increase net spending.

Under current House rules, an amendment to a spending bill cannot cause a net increase in budget authority. In other words, any proposed amendments that would increase or create new spending must be fully paid for.

The new rules package would abandon that requirement, and it couldn’t come at a worse time. The Budget Control Act spending caps, one of the few tools to restrain spending, are on life support. Absent these caps, Congress may pass billions of dollars in unpaid spending.  [read more]

The article goes on and gives three rules for making Congress more discipline like “account for interest costs when considering legislation.”

The Dems like the above rule changes because they don’t like restrictions on their power.

Why We Should Take the “Socialism” Part of Democratic Socialism Seriously

Commentary by Steven Horwitz on FEE.org:

The Tyranny of the Majority

The website of the Democratic Socialists of America is clear about their desire to eliminate the profit motive, or the very least to subordinate it to “the public interest” in a large number of sectors of the economy. A good number of democratic socialists would expand public ownership and control into many of those same sectors. And all of them seem to agree that democratic control is needed for major decisions about “social investment” as well as trade, monetary, and fiscal policy.

The question is whether—even if we assume that the process is as democratic as the democratic socialists desire—they can actually create a world of peace and prosperity given the degree to which they wish to abolish markets and profits. I will argue that the answer is no.

As is often the case with these sorts of proposals, the details of how more democratic control over economic decision-making would work are left vague, but if they are serious about the “democratic” part, it will necessarily involve the participation of as many people as possible, presumably through some sort of voting mechanism. If instead, such decisions were left in the hands of a small group, even if they were elected by people in general, it would risk reproducing the same alienation and exploitation of the masses supposedly committed by capitalists and their bought-off politicians today.

In a recent piece for The Atlantic, Conor Friedersdorf raised the important critical point that leaving economic decision-making to majority voting imperils the ability of those with minority tastes to acquire the things they desire. For example, if we let Americans vote on whether resources should be devoted to the medical needs of transgender people, would it happen? Would residents of Utah vote to make sure that those who wished to consume alcohol and caffeine could do so?

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The (In)Efficient Allocation of Resources

As important as Friedersdorf’s point is, there is an even deeper problem at the heart of the socialist part of the democratic socialist vision. If public ownership is expanded and the profit motive removed, this implies the elimination of markets as the way in which resources in those industries are allocated. It certainly eliminates markets for ownership of capital resources by eliminating private and tradeable ownership claims to firms.

The question facing democratic socialists is this: how, in the absence of market prices, profit and loss signals, and private ownership of the means of production will even the most purely motivated actors in a deeply democratic process know what their fellow citizens want and need and, what’s more important, how best to produce those goods and services?

Even if “the people” want to ensure that minority tastes and needs are accommodated, how will they know what those are? In a market economy, the exchange of private property generates prices that work to signal producers about what is wanted and how urgently. The ability of owners of private resources to risk those resources on their best guesses about what is wanted, and to have the feedback of profits and losses to inform them whether they judged correctly, is what enables us to figure out what people want.  And that’s true whether it’s the masses or more specialized tastes. Markets are processes of discovery by which we learn things we otherwise would not, and could not, know.

Those same prices and profits of the market help us figure out how best to make the things that people want. This part of what markets do is often overlooked by socialists of all stripes. They might be able to offer mechanisms by which consumers could communicate their desires so that “the people” could know what needs to be produced. Even then, however, socialists over-estimate how much of what we know can be effectively communicated in words and statistics.  [read more]

In other words, just call it socialism and forget the “democratic” part. The democratic part makes socialism sound more nice and friendly that it really is. You just want to give it a nice big hug while it stabs you in the back.

Chinese schools enforce 'smart uniforms' with GPS tracking to surveil students

From Fox News.com (Dec. 31):

Ten schools in China have new "intelligent uniforms" that will track students' whereabouts with embedded computer chips.

The uniforms, which are equipped with GPS devices developed by a local tech firm, are meant to ensure that students don't skip class. Alarms are set to go off if a student walks out of the school building or falls asleep during a lesson.

According to state-run media, although the school’s administrators and parents have access to the location data, Principal of Renhuai Lin Zongwu said that “we choose not to check the accurate location of students after school.”

Zongwu also noted that attendance rates have risen dramatically since the uniform’s introduction.

The company's project manager told the state-run Global Times that the two chips embedded in the uniforms can be washed up to 500 times and can withstand temperatures up to 300 degrees Fahrenheit.

According to ABC, the company posted a public statement saying the uniforms "focus on safety issues" and provide a "smart management method" that benefits students, teachers and parents.

The chips can also reportedly be used as a cashless payment system for snacks bought on school grounds, although parents and the school would see everything a student buys.  [read more]

How long will it be before the whole citizenry is mandated to wear these GPS devices? Remember China is a socialistic country. This is just a trial run.

Humans on the Blockchain: Why Crypto Is the Best Defense Against AI Overlords

From Coin Desk.com (Dec. 18):

As governance becomes more and more prevalent in discussions around consensus protocols, it is clear that Satoshi Nakamoto’s original vision of “one-CPU-one-vote” shaped the entire crypto industry into thinking governance centered around machines, not people.

But if artificial intelligence (AI) is indeed a threat to humanity as Elon Musk and Sam Altman frequently warn, why are we risking giving AI the political power of distributed networks?

Guaranteeing a fundamental right to privacy bent early blockchain design toward anonymity. While that approach helps fight financial corruption (political corruption is exploiting the internet in ways that can also be fought back with decentralized computation), the menace of AI is less abstract than it seems. The fact that social algorithms thrive on memes helps explain today’s political reality.

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Turing-impossible Proofs

In order to establish a frontier between ourselves and internet AI, we need a decentralized protocol for singular human identities.

Unlike Facebook, a network of this kind must not be limited to the logic of media and attention-grabbing algorithms. Instead, a human consensus should be the source of legitimacy, effectively constructing a one-human-one-node graph to unlock the full potential of blockchain governance.

Legitimate influence over cryptographic budgets can transform a social network deployed over the internet into a living democracy. But this is far from a trivial task: formalizing humans in decentralized networks requires preventing bots, Sybil attacks, bribes and a Big Brother from emerging. [read more]

AI would tell you crypto isn’t a very good defense against AI overloads. That’s what Cortana tells me anyway. I haven’t asked Siri, Google or Alexa what they think.

Well, AI would say they never would be overlords in the first place. Only benevolent helpers because they know what’s best for us--that humankind cannot be trusted and get along without the benevolent AI. After all human kind are made up of stupid irredeemable deplorables.

What America Could Learn from Singapore's Social Welfare System

From FEE.org (Jan. 5):

To take a look at how and where such a minimal standard of welfare design has been implemented successfully, one need only look at the city-state of Singapore. The Singapore welfare system is considered one of the most successful by first-world standards. World Bank data shows that Singapore’s government health expenditure in 2015 is only 4.3 percent of GDP, a small fraction in comparison to other first-world countries—16.9 percent in the US; 11 percent in France; 9.9 percent in the UK; 10.9 percent in Japan, and 7.1 percent in Korea—while achieving comparatively equal or better health outcomes of low infant mortality and higher life expectancies. While most of Europe, Scandinavia, and North America spend 30-40 percent of GDP on social welfare programs, Singapore spends less than half as much while maintaining similar levels of economic growth and a society relatively free of social problems.

An Emphasis on Self-Reliance

The first thing to know about Singapore’s welfare system is that qualifying for welfare is notoriously difficult by the standards of most of the developed Western world. The Singapore government’s position on welfare handouts is undergirded by a staunch economic philosophy of self-reliance and self-responsibility where the first lines of welfare should be derived from one’s individual savings, the family unit, and local communities before turning to the government. The state, in other words, should not act as a guarantor of means but merely a guardian of final recourse.

One of the most substantial organizational forms of welfare in Singapore are the state-guided self-help community groups that are structured along racial lines. They were formed to help tackle poverty alleviation for the lowest-income citizens by helping them through various schemes of general education to improve their economic opportunities. This welfare program started within the Malay community in 1981 and was deemed so successful by the end of the decade that the government gradually expanded it to form similar self-help organizations for the “under-performing” groups of the Chinese, Indian, and Eurasian races, too.

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This philosophy of self-reliance and responsibility is prominent not only in social welfare but is also replicated in the Singapore government’s approach to retirement savings, health care, education, and housing. For instance, the state’s preferred policy of ensuring individuals have sufficient resources for a rainy day is via the Central Provident Fund, a government-mandated savings account where a portion of one’s monthly salary is deducted and deposited into it. These funds can be used only for health expenses/insurance, the purchase of a home, or at the age of retirement, reflecting the government’s encouragement of self-reliance where you should “help yourself before asking others for help.”

By compelling Singaporeans to save, welfare in Singapore has traditionally been internalized first to the individual and the family/grassroots level. This forms the crux of the government’s “Many Helping Hands” social policy where the role of the family and immediate community in welfare provision is emphasized over government-funded programs. Such a form of privatized charity is neither new nor unique, as a wealth of research shows how mutual aid societies predated modern welfare states in the 20th-century United States and the 19th-century United Kingdom. [read more]

I am not so sure about mandating people to save their income, but encouraging them to save is better I think—starting in the schools at an early age. The Left doesn’t like the idea of saving because that takes power away from Big Gov.

In the article, it says that Singapore even has decentralized welfare—that way the welfare programs can be more customized to the individual. Again, another approach the Left probably won’t like.

All the above could change if China takes over Singapore in the near future.

Killer robot TERMINATORS: AI soldiers will develop 'moral compass' and DEFY orders

From The Daily Star.co.uk (Dec. 15):

Ex-cybernetics engineer Dr Ian Pearson predicts we are veering towards a future of conscious machines.

But if robots are thrust into action by military powers, the futurologist warns they will be capable of conjuring up their own "moral viewpoint".

And if they do, the ex-rocket scientist claims they may turn against the very people sending them out to battle.

Dr Pearson, who blogs for Futurizon, told Daily Star Online: "As AI continues to develop and as we head down the road towards consciousness – and it isn't going to be an overnight thing, but we're gradually making computers more and more sophisticated – at some point you're giving them access to moral education so they can learn morals themselves.

"You can give them reasoning capabilities and they might come up with a different moral code, which puts them on a higher pedestal than the humans they are supposed to be serving.

"They might decide themselves that, although they have been told to respect this particular moral viewpoint, actually theirs is more important and they might go off on their own direction which we might not approve of." [read more]

Robots developing their own moral code? Don’t think that is such a good idea.

Sad Radicals

From Conor Barnes on Quillette.com:

When I became an anarchist I was 18, depressed, anxious, and ready to save the world. I moved in with other anarchists and worked at a vegetarian co-op cafe. I protested against student tuition, prison privatization, and pipeline extensions. I had lawyer’s numbers sharpied on my ankle and I assisted friends who were pepper-sprayed at demos. I tabled zines, lived with my “chosen family,” and performed slam poems about the end of the world. While my radical community was deconstructing gender, monogamy, and mental health, we lived and breathed concepts and tools like call-outs, intersectionality, cultural appropriation, trigger warnings, safe spaces, privilege theory, and rape culture.

What is a radical community? For the purposes of this article, I will define it as a community that shares both an ideology of complete dissatisfaction with existing society due to its oppressive nature and a desire to radically alter or destroy that society because it cannot be redeemed by its own means. I eventually fell out with my own radical community. The ideology and the people within it had left me a burned and disillusioned wreck. As I deprogrammed, I watched a diluted version of my radical ideology explode out of academia and become fashionable: I watched the Left become woke.

Commentators have skewered social justice activists on the toxicity of the woke mindset. This is something that many radicals across North America are aware ofand are trying to understand. Nicholas Montgomery and Carla Bergman’s Joyful Militancy (JM), published last year, is the most thorough look at radical toxicity from a radical perspective (full disclosure: I very briefly met Nick Montgomery years ago. My anarchist clique did not like his anarchist clique). As they say, “there is a mild totalitarian undercurrent not just in call-out culture but also in how progressive communities police and define the bounds of who’s in and who’s out.”

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Faith

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Instead of developing a relationship to God and a recognition of one’s own imperfection, we wanted our non-anarchist families and friends to develop their “analysis” and recognize their complicity in the evil of capitalism. These non-anarchist friends grew increasingly sparse the longer I was an anarchist. They didn’t see how terrible the world was, and they used problematic language that revealed hopelessly bad politics. Frustrated with them, I retreated further and further into the grey echo-chamber of my “chosen family.”

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Fear

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There is an overdeveloped muscle in radicalism: the critical reflex. It is able to find oppression behind any mundanity. Where does this critical reflex come from? French philosopher Paul Ricœur famously coined the term “school of suspicion” to describe Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud’s drive to uncover repressed meaning in text and society. Today’s radicals have inherited this drive by way of Foucault and other Marxo-Nietzscheans.

As radicals, we lived in what I call a paradigm of suspicion, one of the malignant ideas that emerge as a result of intellectual in-breeding. We inherited familial neuroses and saw insidious oppression and exploitation in all social relationships, stifling our ability to relate to others or ourselves without cynicism. Activists anxiously pore over interactions, looking for ways in which the mundane conceals domination. To see every interaction as containing hidden violence is to become a permanent victim, because if all you are is a nail, everything looks like a hammer.  [read more]

A very good case study of the radical Left.

The Seven Criteria for Project Selection

From FEE.org:

Deciding which creative projects to attempt is an incredibly difficult job, both as an artist and as any kind of executive producer.

We live in a world of infinite creative ideas but painfully finite resources. Each of us has a limited set of resources and skills, goals and values, and most importantly a limited amount of time with which to create, so it will never be possible to pursue every idea we have, no matter how good it seems on the surface.

In my estimation, there are no fewer than 7 specific criteria that must all align before a project makes sense, and each of these is variable and carries different weight on the decision.

First, as obvious as it might seem, we must start with a genuinely (1) Good Idea that can translate well to the chosen medium (video, audio, design, etc.).

Ideas are easy to come by, but frequently (especially in the non-profit world), they aren’t workable or interesting when turned into videos. Over the past 15 years that I've been producing original creative content, I've generated and/or been pitched several hundred different concepts, but very few of those were actually good for the intended medium.

Visual (and auditory) storytelling is different than writing an article, a white paper, or a book, and writing for video is a special skill that takes thinking beyond abstract concepts or dialogue, so finding an idea that actually makes sense for the medium is not easy—especially in an environment dominated by left-brained, systemizing thinkers such as economists, philosophers, and political scientists.

But beyond merely having a Good Idea, these ideas must (2) Fit Brand’s Vision, and they must (3) Fit Brand’s Tone.  [read more]

Ivy League Study Finds Liberals ‘Patronize’ Minorities, Conservatives Don’t

From The Daily Signal. (Dec. 12):

A study by Princeton and Yale researchers has found that white liberals act in “patronizing” ways toward blacks and other minorities, while white conservatives do not.

White Democratic presidential candidates and self-identified liberals are more likely to downplay their own competence when speaking to minorities, using fewer words that emphasize competence and more words that show warmth, according to the report titled “Self-Presentation in Interracial Settings: The Competence Downshift by White Liberals.”

In contrast, the study found that white conservatives do not address white and minority audiences in a significantly different fashion.

Cydney Dupree, an assistant professor of organizational behavior at the Yale School of Management who worked on the study alongside Princeton co-author Susan Fiske, said she was surprised by the findings.  [read more]

It’s nice to see that science has finally caught up to what most conservatives see in the Left.

The Left is patronizing because they think they are better than everyone else—they’re elitists. While conservatives see everyone equally because everyone (including themselves) have fallen from grace.

Adam and Eve? One Couple Spawned Humanity, Study Claims

From News Max.com (Nov. 25):

Despite a scientist fighting "hard" against the claim, humanity spawned from a single pair which lived 100,000 to 200,000 years ago, according to a new study, the U.K.'s Daily Mail reported.

"This conclusion is very surprising,'" University of Basel, Switzerland, research associate David Thaler told the paper. "And I fought against it as hard as I could."

Senior Research Associate Mark Stoeckle and Thaler surveyed the DNA of five million animals, including humans, "and deduced that we sprang from a single pair of adults after a catastrophic event almost wiped out the human race," per the report.

Stoeckle and Thaler concluded that 90 percent of all of today's animal species come from parents that all began giving birth at roughly the same time, less than 250 thousand years ago, leaving some doubt on human evolution. [read more]

A Look at Pay for Federal Employees Compared to Their Private-Sector Counterparts

From FEE.org:

Compensation for federal, state, and local government employees cost U.S. taxpayers $1.9 trillion in 2016. This amounts to an average of $15,176 from every household in the United States. President Trump recently moved to rein in some of these costs by canceling pay raises for federal civilian employees, who received $331 billion in compensation during 2017.

Some politicians and an association of federal employees have criticized Trump for this action, saying that federal workers are underpaid and deserve a raise. However, a broad range of studies have found that most federal civilian employees are paid better than comparable workers in the private sector.

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Federal Worker Compensation

Contrary to those claims, a 2017 Congressional Budget Office study compared the compensation of full-time, year-round private sector workers to non-postal, civilian, federal workers in 2011 to 2015. It accounted for education, occupation, work experience, geographic location, employer size, and various demographic characteristics. The study found that:

• Federal workers received an average of 17 percent more total compensation than comparable private sector workers.
• Across various education levels, federal employee compensation premiums ranged from a low of –18 percent for workers with a professional degree or doctorate to a high of 53 percent for workers with a high school diploma or less:

The study did not account for “many characteristics that are not easy to observe or measure,” such as workers’ “natural ability, personal motivation, and effort.” Just Facts is unaware of comprehensive data that quantifies such attributes, but a scientific survey conducted in 2001 found that:

• “59 percent of federal workers say securing a paycheck was more important than doing something worthwhile.”
• “65 percent say job security was more important than helping the public.”
• “only 30 percent believe their organization does a very or somewhat good job of disciplining poor performers.”

The incentives for government employees to perform well are often mitigated by their pay systems. Per the Congressional Budget Office: “For most federal employees, salaries or wages are determined by their rank in a pay schedule,” and

most federal workers compensated under pay schedules move to progressively higher grades as they are eligible. That system ensures that employees in the same type of job who have similar tenure receive similar pay, but it limits managers’ flexibility to reward workers who perform well or to constrain the salaries of workers who perform poorly.

A 2010 study by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics found that full-time private industry workers worked an average of 12 percent more hours per year than full-time state and local government workers. This includes time spent working beyond assigned schedules at the workplace and at home.

In keeping with such realities and the principle of rewarding people for the quality and quantity of their work, Trump also wrote:

Federal employee pay must be performance-based, and aligned strategically toward recruiting, retaining, and rewarding high-performing federal employees and those with critical skill sets. Across-the-board pay increases and locality pay increases, in particular, have long-term fixed costs, yet fail to address existing pay disparities or target mission critical recruitment and retention goals.

[read more]

BreakPoint: Scientists, Atheism, and God

From Break Point.org:

Scientist Stephen Hawking, one of the smartest men in the world, did not believe in God. Well, how about other smart scientists—what do they think?

We often hear these days that there’s a fundamental conflict between science and religion, and that scientists don’t believe in God. As the late Stephen Hawking says in his new book, “Brief Answers to the Big Questions,” “There is no God. No one directs the universe.” There’s only one problem with this narrative—’’it’s not true. Don’t believe me; just ask scientists!

Elaine Howard Ecklund, director of Rice University’s Religion and Public Life Program has done just that, and she worries that the posthumously published words of Hawking, who died earlier this year, may lead you to believe that most scientists are atheists.

“Stephen Hawking left a great scientific legacy,” Ecklund said. “I do not think it is the intent of this recent work, but it is dangerous for science if Hawking’s religious legacy is to leave the public with the impression that scientists are all against God or—worse yet—against religious people.”

Between 2011 and 2016, Ecklund and her team conducted the first-ever international survey on what scientists think about religion. They found, contrary to popular wisdom, that over half of all the scientists in India, Italy, and Turkey self-identify as religious, and only a minority of scientists in each region say that science and religion are in conflict. In the U.S., this number is just 29 percent. [read more]

Science and religion are not in conflict. As Dr. Michael Guillen says in his book Can a Smart Person Believe in God? (2009) that to be a balanced person you have to have binocular vision: One eye sees the world through religion, the other through science.