Most of us, as human beings, tend to feel very strongly about those beliefs that we hold dear. In most places, those strong feelings center on religious faith, sometimes on the family, sometimes on political or social beliefs, and to a lesser degree on other matters, at least for most people, from what I’ve observed. There’s nothing inherently wrong with believing in something strongly, even passionately, but most of human history is replete with violence seemingly triggered by those passionate beliefs. Why do I say “seemingly”? Because, in the overwhelming majority of instances, those seeking power and dominance use those beliefs in causes against others in order to bolster their own position and power.

Henry VIII’s split with Rome and the Catholic faith, and his creation of the Church of England, had little to do with the vast majority of tenets of the Catholic Church, but everything to do with his desire to divorce his queen and remarry in order to have a son to inherit the crown – surely an issue of power and dominance.

Luther’s ninety-five theses nailed to the door of Castle Church in Wittenberg, Germany, sparked the Protestant Reformation, which was initially far more about reforming abuses of power in the Catholic Church than about changing fundamental beliefs in God and Christ.

The split in Islam, between Shia and Sunni, arose essentially over the issue of who should lead the faith after the death of the Prophet Mohammed in 632 A.D. While other issues separating the two have arisen, the split was basically about power and dominance, and it remains the same today.

While Ireland has seen a long history of Protestant/Catholic conflict and animosity, that conflict is far more rooted in power than doctrine, since the vast majority of those in power in Ireland after the end of the Williamite War in 1691 were, prior to the Irish Revolution of 1916, members of the Protestant Ascendency. After the partition of Ireland and the end of most hostilities in the Republic of Ireland in 1923, the Protestants retained economic and social control in Northern Ireland, and that conflict continued almost unabated until the agreement of 1998, although hostilities still simmer, largely because of economic and political inequalities.

The American Revolution, for all the talk of freedom, was about who controlled the resources and the economy of the then thirteen colonies and about British restrictions on trade and manufactures.

The Taliban and ISIS, while they claim to be Islamic, seem to be far more interested in power and control than in any of the more peaceful aspects of Islam. And certainly, the Crusades were far more about power and plunder than religion, despite all the rhetoric to the contrary.

This desire for control, and wanting to have government force people who are different to “do things my way” remains a disturbing aspect of politics in the United States, and elsewhere.

No matter what anyone may say in religious terms about the abortion/anti-abortion conflict in the U.S., that conflict is purely and simply about who has control of a woman’s body – the woman or an outsider, whether that outsider is either a religious belief, her husband, or the government. All the rationalizing and reasoning, all the saying why, doesn’t change that basic fact. It’s about control. So is the issue of who can marry whom.

Yet government has to have laws, and enforce them, or there will be chaos. As a number of politicians and sages have noted, liberty also requires order. Order requires popular support. So any law that enslaves or unnecessarily controls a significant percentage of the population eventually creates unrest and often violence. This rather obvious truth tends to be ignored by those who use beliefs to obtain or maintain power over others.

As far as laws or practices being unnecessarily controlling, there’s a simple question that can resolve many of those questions. Does the law in practice physically or economically harm certain groups of people? It would seem to me, simple man that I am, that believing in a different god or the same god in a different way harms no one. Taking up a gun to force that belief does so.

The bottom line is whether beliefs are used for self-motivation and guidance or whether they’re used to force beliefs on others – or to harm or kill those who believe differently.

Beware those who trumpet beliefs while brandishing laws or weapons and ask who will gain control of what – and how.

The other day I ran across an interesting statement from a scientist (which I’d attribute if I could recall where I read it) to the effect that the “universe has no colors.” He went on to explain that what we see as colors are essentially the different energy levels of photons either emitted by or reflected from objects and that colors are the interpretation of those levels by our brains. Experiments and observation have determined that this visual perception differs from species to species and between men and women. Women perceive more different shades than men in the ranges of blue and green.

None of this is necessarily particularly surprising, and while colors may only be an interpretation of photonic frequencies by my gray matter, I certainly prefer that interpretation to shades of gray. To me, it would seem that living in a world of gray would be rather depressing, but that just might be my personal bias.

Years ago, Charles Harness wrote a book entitled Redworld, set on a world around Barnard’s Star where colors and color perception are very different because Barnard’s Star emits largely reddish light and the planetary atmosphere is an oxygen/ammonia mix. The result is that all the planetary phonic frequencies, if you will, are overwhelmingly shades of red and ochre, and the intelligent humanoid life there has evolved to discern a wide range of reddish shades, but infrequent “colors” like violet or yellow are perceived as gray or black. I won’t speak to the accuracy of this depiction, but since Harness had an undergraduate degree in chemistry, I would suspect it’s largely correct.

In retrospect, Harness was on to something, although I didn’t see it that way when I first read the short novel nearly thirty years ago. Since “colors” are more easily and quickly distinguished than are shades of gray, that interpretation enhances our perceptive ability, and as a result, our survivability as a species, and the same would have held true of Pol and his people in Redworld.

Yet how many people consider how perception colors not only our views of the world [yes, it is a terrible pun], but biases how we think? And yet, that perception of the universe varies between individuals and species… and yet, as the protagonist in Redworld is told, white [or blond] for him is black.

Earlier this year, all of the Democratic candidates for the presidency proposed a new tax, one targeted almost exclusively at the wealthiest Americans. Such a financial transaction tax (FTT) would impose a sales tax on trades of stocks, bonds, derivatives, and other securities. The tax levels proposed differ, and range from one basis point [one hundredth of one percent] to as high as fifty basis points, although most economists seem to think the lower ranges will actually generate more tax revenue. Just to keep this in perspective, an FFT of one basis point would raise revenues of just ten cents on a transaction of one thousand dollars. A $100,000 transaction would raise just ten dollars.

That doesn’t sound like it would raise that much in revenue, but consider that annual trades in stocks alone in the U.S. are approaching fifty trillion dollars, and the total trading in stocks, bonds, derivatives, and other similar financial instruments exceeds six hundred trillion dollars, according to the Tax Policy Center. Depending on the tax level chosen, annual revenues would range from around $40 billion to as much as $210 billion.

The interesting aspect of the FTT is that the vast majority of the taxes would fall on the wealthiest Americans and particularly on high volume automated securities trades, those trades which contribute the least to economic growth and perhaps the most to the pocketbooks of hedge fund managers and the like. Over 75% of the tax would fall on the top fifth of the population in earnings, and 40% on the top one percent, but even for the top one percent, the tax would increase their overall tax liability by less than one percent, and for those in lower income brackets, the impact would be less than a quarter of a percent of income.

Some of those in the finance industry complain that such a tax would reduce trading volumes without decreasing market volatility, especially if an FTT is imposed with tax levels as high as those under consideration in Europe, but even the highest rates proposed to date in the U.S., by Senator Sanders, are well below the proposed European levels. Critics also suggest that an FTT would turn investors away from U.S. markets, but in practice that seems highly unlikely, given that such taxes either already exist elsewhere or are under active consideration.

Critics of the FTT tend to overlook several basic points. First of all, high-speed stock trading is simply using advanced technologies in order to get information a millisecond before other traders. High-speed trading doesn’t make markets more efficient, but it does increase stock prices, out of which the traders make money. It’s actually a sophisticated form of an old practice, called front-running, which was illegal. High-speed trading doesn’t create efficiency, but it does create the possibility of debacles like the “Flash Crash” of May 2010.

Second, use of high-speed computers, sophisticated algorithms, and confidential information unavailable to small investors doesn’t improve the productivity of financial markets. Such technology and systems just tilt the market in favor of those traders. Likewise, trading in ever more complex derivatives – making bets on bets – doesn’t add real value. It’s merely speculation that makes the system more vulnerable to big losses, as occurred in the financial crisis of 2008.

Third, one of the aspects of the finance sector that’s been overlooked is that it now produces a quarter of corporate profits while creating just 4% of American jobs. Who says speculation and computerized market-churning doesn’t pay?

Given all that, why shouldn’t we push for a financial transactions tax? Especially since most of those insisting that we need to balance the federal budget are the very people who’d pay most of the tax?

In the musical Hamilton, there’s a song, although it pains me to call it that, entitled “The Room Where It Happens,” which deals with the whole idea of compromises and deals made behind closed doors, as well as a few other matters. In counterpoint to that, a recent article by Jonathan Rauch in the Atlantic Monthly, entitled “What’s Ailing American Politics” dissects the reasons for the current failure of the American political system, and much of the reason for that failure Rausch attributes to “excessive reforms,” all made with the best of intentions, but which now, in the age of excessive media coverage, which he fails to note, interesting enough, has resulted in a situation where political compromises in Congress are essentially almost impossible, except in extreme and extenuating circumstances. In turn, that forces the President to use what administrative tools he or she has in order to get much accomplished, and that, in turn angers Congress more and further polarizes the political spectrum.

As illustrated both in history and the Hamilton musical, in the past often the bitterest of political opponents managed to hammer out compromises – except on one issue, that of slavery, which failure led inexorably to the Civil War. Some have said it was over states’ rights, but the principal reason for wanting a greater degree of states’ rights in the old South was the perceived need to continue the institution of slavery. In the end, however, that failure to reach an accommodation resulted in the bloodiest war in U.S. history. In an intellectual sense, and in terms of the views of southern landholders, the need to retain slavery is certainly understandable, since often the majority of the worth of those plantations lay as much, if not more, in the value of the slaves as in the value of the land. And no one likes the idea of an “outsider” confiscating by law family assets and changing an entire way of life, particularly when those in charge of the state governments are also generally from the ranks of the affluent landholders.

Unhappily, we’re seeing a variation on this theme today, where the current “landholders” are various segments of the one tenth of one percent of the U.S. population that don’t want their ways of life changed. The quest for profits and control have become paramount in the U.S. today, particularly the profits of massive corporations, and much of that profit has come from reducing the cost of labor as a percentage of operating costs, either through off-shoring labor-intensive processes or through automation. Although I’ve never seen it quantified, these two initiatives have resulted in the displacement of comparatively well-paid skilled and semi-skilled workers, putting them into the labor pool at a time when not as many other good-paying jobs were being created in the United States. In turn, this effectively restrained wage growth across the entire economy. The result was the effective devaluation of the worth of the minimum wage and general degeneration of middle class wage levels over the past thirty years.

Because of the popular perception that the majority of higher-paying jobs require a college or even a post-graduate degree — a perception that has a great deal of truth in it, but which neglects higher-skilled jobs requiring additional non-collegiate training and education, not surprisingly, young people began attempting to obtain those credentials at an ever higher rate, but with the demand, colleges and universities had to expand, and expansion costs money, which state legislatures didn’t want to fund. So tuition costs soared. And because a great number of parents of these younger people didn’t have the funds to pay for their children’s higher education, unsurprisingly, since their wages hadn’t kept pace, the students took out student loans.

This has resulted in a situation where the U.S. is now producing roughly twice as many college graduates each year as there are higher-paid college jobs for them, and that, in turn, has a depressing effect on the wages and salaries of those who do obtain those jobs, and a debt burden that most likely can’t possibly be repaid be those who have to settle for lower-paid jobs. Another result of all these trends is that we now have possibly the largest percentage of “under-employed” people in the history of the country.

And they aren’t happy about it, as shown by the recent presidential primary campaigns.

Yet those who are responsible for this situation seem to be oblivious to the potential forces that they have unleashed, and they oppose any changes, any compromises to deal with this continuing and growing problem, just as the old South refused to confront the growing problem of slavery. The same is also true, by the way, of the position of the NRA.

As Mark Twain is reputed to have said, while history doesn’t repeat itself, it does rhyme. I might be missing something, but it seems to me that the Russian aristocracy of 1910, the southern landholders of 1860, and the U.S. robber barons of the 1880s all might rhyme with the U.S. economic aristocracy of today.

That sort of rhyme usually doesn’t turn out well.

I’d be the first to admit that there are people I do not like; faiths which I feel are destructive, prejudicial, and antithetical to human rights; and politicians who I believe pursue unproductive and often evil ends. But, at least so far, I haven’t gone around shooting them or filling the air and the internet with vituperation and hate speech. And I certainly wouldn’t even think about doing violence to individuals merely because of their beliefs, sexual or political orientation, gender, or their ethnic background. I might well consider violence against those who have actually committed violence against others on grounds of belief, gender, ethnicity or the like.

But what I want to know is why so many people in the world believe that it is their right, duty, or obligation to beat up, torture, kill, or restrict the personal freedom of those who do not share their religious faith, sexual orientation, or political beliefs. I can understand locking up people who commit violent acts, and I can even understand violent protests against oppression.

But what earthly or unearthly good is accomplished by staging a protest against someone’s sexuality at that person’s funeral? Especially when someone has been cruelly murdered because of their sexual orientation?

Europe was wracked with centuries of religious wars over which faith would control what government. Tens of millions of innocents died. That was exactly why the Founding Fathers wanted separation of church and state, yet today we now have millions of various religious fundamentalists here in the United States demanding that secular law conform to their beliefs.

Just because it’s far worse in much of the world shouldn’t really offer much comfort. In terms of basic human rights, why should any government have the right to support or to enforce practices that insist that leaving the faith – whatever that faith might be – merits a death sentence? Or that anyone who criticizes or mocks a faith or its tenets or its prophets or leaders deserves to die? Or that genders other than straight heterosexual males have lesser or no rights, or perhaps even no right to life?

All of that boils down to outright hatred of anyone who is different. It’s one thing to hate someone for actual despicable acts; it’s another to hate simply because people are different. Or perhaps, it’s just an excuse to grab or hold power, and that makes it even more despicable.

But then, it’s oh so much simpler just to claim that all differences are “wrong,” and should be punished… or that people deserve what comes to them because they don’t share the same beliefs. It’s funny, too, how so many people who pray to the same almighty god are so willing to kill people who don’t believe in that same god in the same way.

Hatred, anyone?