GOVERNMENT-ORDERED RELIGION

What limits do the “spiritual but not religious” people have? They believe the 12-step method of addiction recovery as in Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) and Narcotics Anonymous (NA).

They pray to their not-religious God (step 11). They surrender their wills and lives to their not-religious God. And they try to win converts to their not-religious dogma that is not dogma.

Insidiously, now we have at least 22 Dual Diagnosis Anonymous meetings on government property, with a government-paid professional facilitator, including at Lane County Behavioral Health and the women’s prison in Salem. The dual therein means an addiction problem and a psychiatric disorder.

For a legal perspective, Google the court case Griffin v. Coughlin, one of the decisions the U.S. Supreme Court let stand. AA and NAwere intensely religious.

Furthermore, AA wins any contest in absolute numbers; but its one-year abstinence outcomes hover around 3 percent, coming from the long forms of AA’s own Triennial Membership Surveys. It is a failed method. Its propaganda machine is unbelievably effective. Its open-mindedness does not extend into disbelief in spiritual matters. 

Kevin Russell
Eugene

STOP WORRYING AND LEARN TO LOVE THE SMALL MODULAR NUCLEAR REACTOR

Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer ends with the physicist believing that handing the power of the atom over to a society with as large a death drive as ours has made global atmospheric ignition inevitable. Since then we’ve proven that we don’t need nuclear fire to cook the planet; July was the hottest month ever recorded on Earth. In our time, the relentless spew of carbon emissions is a terrible and unstoppable destroyer of worlds. With the failure of the natural gas ban, we know even our local political economy is too captured by the interests of capital to offer any feeble stopgap against it.

My question for anti-nuclear activists is this: Do you believe global climate change to be an existential threat or not? I think that if you truly understand the extent of the crisis and our relative powerlessness in the face of it, you would welcome any fragmentary solution. Every time activists shut down a nuclear power facility, more megawatt-hours of consumer electricity are inevitably supplemented with coal plants. So too, every man-hour spent protesting a nuclear facility is not spent protesting the burning of hydrocarbons. The doom is here, now, and we cannot afford to rebuff any opportunity to ameliorate it.

Penelope Pascal
Eugene

KOTEK HASN’T KEPT HER PROMISES

I feel the need to have many more initiatives by the populace. Here’s why. Gov. Tina Kotek is giving people drugs, and they should have been in jail or rehabilitation. At this time, they’ll never stop using it. DARE needs to come back strong. How dare Kotek try to profit from marijuana at high potency?

Kotek said, “We certainly don’t need a red-state takeover to clean up the damn trash.”  It’s worse than ever. She hasn’t kept her promise. Kotek allows shoplifting without consequence, and does anyone do something about it? How can business owners live with that? You harm them. Kotek let someone go free from prison recently, and now wants to undo it.

Can’t Kotek get attorneys so they can stay in prison when they need to be? Having someone sliced their face or broken bones is bad. They can’t afford to pay for the money. We can help each other with initiatives.

How to do it? Businesses can put out signs saying “Oregon Initiatives” and put them on the window in their businesses and other places, all over, statewide. We can quickly do this by having a one stop place to sign up. The more initiatives, the easier it is for the people to take back our government.

Can we do that? You bet you can. We just need to do it. We need a good leader to make it work, to superintend all of Oregon. Is that one you?

Bill Northrup
Eugene