It had to happen eventually. I feel negligent in that I haven’t been on top of the attorney-firing scandal. Basically eight US federal attorneys were fired late last year and early this, in what appears to be pure political motivation (for example, not investigating Democratic corruption enough, or pursuing Republican corruption). Most had extremely high performance ratings, and were booted anyway.

Gonzales’s involvement in the scandal has been someone of a specifically sore point, and lots of Democrats have called for his resignation. Today John Senunu became the first Republican to join in.

Support from many Republicans had been muted, but there was no outright GOP call for his dismissal until now.

“I think the president should replace him,” Sununu said in an interview with The Associated Press. “I think the attorney general should be fired.”

The article as a whole provides pretty good reading on the scandal, and I’d recommend it. It just strikes me as amazing that Bush’s entire team, more than any other president I’m aware of, is going down in flames along with him. People are calling for his vice president, his attorney general, his advisor, his secretary of defense is already down, his press secretary is making an absolute mockery of the job.

I’m simply amazed. As I said before, I’d love to have a camera that could look into the White House like a reality TV show, I want to see what in the world goes on in there.

Well, my last entry on my lack of “friendliness” with my atheism caused a wee bit of a firestorm (though one I certainly appreciate!). So before I get back into my usual schedule of writing about current events and politics, I’ll write a little followup.

One thing that I’ve run into both in the comments, in the emails, and in discussions elsewhere of the article is that being an atheist is no better than being a theist, as both are dogmatic. Theists know there is a god, atheists know there isn’t, and thus only agnosticism is the proper stance to take since we can’t truthfully know 100% in either direction.

The problem with this, one that ol’ Richard Dawkins has gotten into rather nicely, is that it assumes that the probability of god’s existence is 50/50 and it’s up to the theists to prove it definitively or the atheists to disprove it definitively. It is never the responsibility of the disbeliever to disprove that which he doesn’t believe in, only the believer has to justify his belief. An analogy I used in the comments is if I claim I had sex with Jessica Alba. It isn’t your responsibility to track her down, find security footage, or do DNA tests on her to see if I’ve left traces on her. It’s my responsibility to prove that I did.

If a lawyer says that suspect A murdered victim B, it isn’t the defense’s responsibility to prove that he didn’t, it’s the prosecution’s responsibility to prove that he did. We do not assume that it’s true and then hope that the defense’s case is adequate to disprove it. Rather we assume he didn’t and then see if the prosecution’s case is logical (at least ideally, it seems a lot of people reverse the “innocent until proven guilty” mantra).

When someone tells you that God is real and he exists, is it thus your responsibility to prove he doesn’t? Of course not. Particularly with something as inherently out of reach as a god. A murder can be disproven by the defense simply by showing the suspect was somewhere else at the time. But God is unreachable, he exists outside of science (supposedly), and heaven isn’t a “place” that we can visit to check if he’s there.

It’s no different than if I claim that I have a genie in my house that grants wishes. It’s impossible to disprove, I just explain that he’s invisible and won’t perform for a crowd. But my simple assertion of his existence doesn’t immediately mean that it is equally likely that he does and doesn’t exist. I cannot use your ability to disprove my genie as evidence that he isn’t there. The common, and entirely faulty, phrase is “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence”.

The glaring error is that this opens the possibility up to anything and everything, and gives theists no reason to believe in one god over the other. No Christian can disprove Allah, no Muslim can disprove Yahweh, and none of them can disprove Thor, Zeus, Jupiter, Baal, or any of the other ancient gods. As they all live in some kind of intangible ether, the inability to prove that any of them don’t exist would, it seems, mean that we are all forced to be agnostic toward absolutely every current and ancient deity.

But no one is like that as far as I’m aware. The theists who stamp their feet and cry that their god cannot be disproven do not apply that logic to any other gods, and the agnostics who sniff at atheists for being dogmatic are not willing to extend such possibilities to the ancient polytheistic religions.

Why’s that? Because there is, in all of our minds, a standard of sorts for what is believable. The agnostics, and many of the modern Christians, will scoff at those who take the Bible literally, saying it’s not that God literally created the world in six days. No, Noah didn’t have all of the billions of species on his boat, and he certainly wasn’t 950 when he died. God didn’t come down as a burning bush and he isn’t a man in a long white beard who sits on a physical throne, and there’s no literal pearly gate to walk through with St Peter sitting at a podium in front of it.

We reject the ancient gods as their claims are equally ludicrous. Day doesn’t change to night because of a chariot being flown across the sky, there’s no Poseidon lurking in the oceans and trees are not inhabited by a god specifically for them. But these other claims cannot be disproven either, combing the ocean will show an absence of evidence of a Poseidon but I’m fairly certain none of the agnostics out there are equally open to that possibility.

Agnostics are only “agnostics” toward things they believe are possible, and reject a myriad of equally un-disprovable things with the same assuredness I reject the things they don’t. Many things have never been disproven, from the previously mentioned gods to the genie in my house, to Bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster. Yet these agnostics never sneer at people who disbelieve in them.

Or maybe I’m crazy.