In this post I try to explain why I did not get confirmed. The decision was a reflection of my personal feeling that organized religion is not necessary, but it should not be taken as trying to belittle those who appreciate and feel the power of organized religion. I should also add that the leadership of my confirmation class could not have been more helpful and supportive.

The Background

My church is an Episcopal church, the relative of the Church of England, though the Episcopal Church of the United States (ECUSA) does not answer to the Archbishop of Canterbury. ECUSA is an independent entity, connected to, but not governed by, Anglican churches in the world. ECUSA is tolerant compared to other religious organizations (women have been admitted as clergy members and bishops for years and several churches have ordained homosexual priests), so I will give them credit for that.

At the beginning of the year, my confirmation class met only a few times. The competition with fall sports proved to be too much for the church to compete with. Even parents often placed priority on football games rather than a confirmation class. Almost immediately it became clear to me that my church handled confirmation in a completely different manner than most other churches.

When I talked about confirmation at school, the collective moans and groans of getting up early to go to church were anticipated, but my other Christian friends told me that confirmation was becoming more like another class than anything else. They had tests in confirmation! Tests on faith! I thought that was crazy because faith didn’t seem like something that should be tested, but I was also grateful that my confirmation class was structured like a discussion group. We would gather after church starting in January and discuss the structure of the church, the readings, and our questions about faith. No tests, hardly any requirements. At the end of the class, we certainly wouldn’t be able to recite bible verses, but we were able to have intelligent conversations. The confirmation leaders/teachers are members of the congregation (they lead discussions and have one-on-one conversations with confirmands) and members of the clergy would teach lessons.

The class was a good experience. Even though there was always the possibility I would not get confirmed, I did the class at my parents’ behest. A few people asked why I did the class even though I wasn’t going to be confirmed. Simply put, the experience gained through the class allowed me to make an informed to decision to not be confirmed.

Why I Didn’t Get Confirmed

Just to avoid the perception that I didn’t get confirmed because it was the easy way out, I will mention that I still sat in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine for 3 hours while everyone else in my class got confirmed. The bishop likes to take his time. I guess compared to eternal peace in heaven, three hours for a confirmation service doesn’t seem like much to him. Below are the reasons I decided not to be confirmed.

Ritual

My confirmation leaders talked a lot about the right to disagree. They told us that we didn’t have to believe exactly what they believed or what the church believes. If I want to believe that communion wine is just a glorified alcoholic beverage, then that’s fine. If I want to believe that it’s Christ’s blood, I can do that too. I was told that the idea of a church is to have a community searching together, even if the beliefs of the community are not exactly the same or even wildly different.

That sounds very good and it appealed to me as a doubter, but I realized the following week as I was sitting in church with the Nicene Creed in front of me that there was a huge problem with that. The ritual. No matter what you believe, the most prominent part of a church experience is the time actually spent in church and during that time, there is a focus on some things that I do not believe in. I don’t see God as a personified figure like he is portrayed in the Bible. My view of God is more like The Force in Star Wars. I can’t reconcile my views with the views recited every Sunday.

It’s Organized

The simple fact that the Episcopal church is organized is troubling to me. I don’t think that organized religion is a good idea. We can certainly organize ourselves into communities of people who are searching, but those communities can be as small as two friends with some similar ideas. As soon as religion becomes a bureaucracy, the potential for harm becomes as great as the potential for good. We’ve seen this in things like the Catholic Church sex abuse scandal. Religion is mostly a private thing for me and I want to keep it that way. I want my religious experience to be about my experiences, not the doctrines of a large group.

Superiority

At one point during the year, one of the other confirmands asked one of the clergy if they thought Episcopalianism was better than other forms of religion. They asked why the particular person was an Episcopalian. The answer was really very sad. The response was that Episcoplianism was better than other relgions, that Episcopalians have it right, and that people of other religions are in various degrees of wrong.

There is no possible way that anyone can say with confidence that their religion is better than everyone else’s. Religion is not something that people can be so sure about that they need to force others to join their religion. People gravitate towards certain religions or beliefs because they personally believe it to be the best for them. But imposing religion on somebody else is, in my opinion, immoral. It is a personal choice and there can be no certainty about which religion is the “best” religion except for each individual.

Not every confirmation leader felt that way and they certainly made that clear, but this particular person is representative of a certain group within the church. I would imagine that this is similar in most religions. Some people believe that their religion is absolutely superior (even to the point where they think everyone else will go to Hell, I’m told). This feeds back into the anti-organized religion argument.

Getting Confirmed Because of Pressure

The exact reason somebody gets confirmed or doesn’t get confirmed isn’t readily apparent. I’m explaining this here in hopes that someone out there has something to add to my thought process, but a lot of other people don’t get the chance to explain. I was talking to a few people after church today and they all had similar stories. One person was confirmed not because of parental pressure, but because of her grandmother. Her grandmother was adamant that she be confirmed and her parents said that after confirmation she would never have to return to church. One person was confirmed, but she almost wasn’t. She spent a lot of time with the confirmation leaders trying to make a decision. A third said they were getting confirmed because “my parents wanted me to” and “it just makes stuff easier.”

It has occured to me that when I hear somebody say they were confirmed because they were pressured, it might be because they actually did want to be confirmed, but they didn’t want to reveal that to their friends. Assuming the people who I was talking to were all telling the truth, however, I think it’s very sad. The importance of confirmation is weakened when people who don’t want to be confirmed are confirmed. I give a lot of credit to the girl who almost didn’t get confirmed. I understand that confirmation is not always about certainty, but it should definitely not be about parental pressure.

Why I Almost Did Get Confirmed

As I said above, confirmation is not always about certainty. In conversations with several confirmation leaders I realized that it’s about accepting some basic principles and moving on from there. I almost got confirmed because I’m not certain but I’m willing to hear new ideas. Ultimately, I found that there were some basics that I didn’t believe in, so I’ve moved on.

Where I Go from Here

My “faith journey” (I hate that term because it makes me think of awful self help books) is only just beginning. The conversations that I have with friends and my personal experiences will fill any gap left by church. At this point, I’m not looking for a spiritual community. What I believe is fine for me right now. It is what I believe and it works for me. When a conversation or experience causes me to question what I believe I’m sure that I will re-think.

Feel free to comment if you were brave enough to read the entire thing. I’ve been suffering from a bad case of incoherent writing this weekend so if you need clarification let me know. As always, feel free to e-mail if you want to have a longer, more detailed conversation.

Note: I’m not a lawyer and this isn’t meant to be legal advice of any sort. This post references United States copyright law only, except where otherwise noted. Copyright law in other countries is generally similar (in the UK, for instance), but it does differ.

Copyright law is difficult(ish). By that I mean it’s not difficult to understand, but it’s very easy to break, and very bad if you get caught. I’ve spent 14 years with two copyright lawyers as parents (loved every minute of it, in case they read this). I have slightly more than a basic understanding (but only slightly), so of course I’ve taken it upon myself to figure out how to save copyright in the technology world. I don’t really expect it to work.

Copyright started in the Constitution. Article 1, Section 8 says:

The Congress shall have power…To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited time to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.

It’s not exactly detailed, but it’s pretty clear. Personally, I wish they had further defined “useful” arts, but they probably weren’t thinking about rap at the time. Title 17 of United States Code was created to fulfill that Constitutional right. As it stands today, you own any “work” (sound recording, video, book, essay, etc.) that you create. You don’t even have to put a copyright notice on it to make it official. You can register a copyright if you want more protection for a modest price. (At the time, by the way, science was considered to be knowledge in general and useful arts are what we would consider a patent).

The difficulty comes with songs and movies. Artists create them and people decide they don’t want to pay 99 cents for the song, so they pirate it in any number of different ways. It’s basically the same with movies. I have very little patience for this type of crime. In fact, I have no patience. It is stealing and it is illegal. It is stealing just as much as people who steal TVs or cars. While the price of the individual download is not worth as much as a nice plasma, the sheer magnitude of the downloads cuts profits for artists as well as studios by quite a bit.

But that’s boring piracy. It’s clearly illegal and while those who only download aren’t generally caught (uploaders are the ones the RIAA and MPAA go after) it’s boring because there’s no gray area or middle ground. There are other scenarios that are more interesting.

So let’s suppose that I love The West Wing (which has the rare quality of also being true) and I have the whole season on DVD (also true). I can’t take my laptop everywhere, so I want to put it on my iPhone, my computer, back it up to an external hard drive, and I’d love to send season two, episode twenty-two to my friend because it’s just that good. I figure that I own the DVDs, so I download Handbrake and rip the whole series to my computer. (Let’s pretend my computer has enough free space for that). And then I realize that 17 U.S.C. 1201 says:

No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title…

So it turns out that I should have paid closer attention to the little FBI warning that the beginning of the episode. I usually wind up being the copyright police at my school and everyone asks me why they can’t copy movies that they own to other devices. The answer is that the license granted in buying the DVDs is only for a DVD player and it is illegal to break technological protection. If it wasn’t, then that would completely do away with a rental model for iTunes and low prices for TV shows, songs, and movies. Even if technological protection didn’t exist, users would still have to contend with copyright law.

And it’s even harder for the independent podcaster who wants to play a clip of Yael Naïm’s “New Soul” on their podcast. They’re probably hoping it’s covered by fair use (17 U.S.C. 107), but probably not. They’re likely infringing on Ms. Naïm’s copyright. If her record label finds out, your friendly neighborhood podcaster would probably be better off playing the Law & Order theme song.

The thing that all of these scenarios have in common is that they hurt the artist and they hurt the recording studio even more. It is simply too easy to upload something and have it downloaded 100,000 times before the end of the hour. That’s 100,000 profitable transactions lost.

So this is what needs to happen. People need to stop pirating and they’re not going to do it unless there’s another easy way to do what they can do with piracy. Ultimately, it’s not going to be free, so there will always be some infringement, but we can reduce the number of people pirating works by changing the way people watch and listen things. The old music industry model is pretty much dead. With the advent of technology, artists don’t have to go through big recording studios who take most of their profit, they can go through smaller studios and even do it on their own because distribution is easier. The movie industry is trying to adapt by working on ad supported models such as Hulu and rental models through services like iTunes. That makes it quick and easy for people to watch things without having to pay a whole ton of money.

So that (sort of) solves the problem of The West Wing fan who wants to watch it on their iPod. They can just download one of the first four seasons from iTunes. It doesn’t solve the problem of the avid podcaster who wants to play “New Soul” shortly before the Law & Order theme song. The answer to that is making licensing easier. Right now licensing is difficult. You have to ask the right holder and pay them a fee that can be quite hefty. For podcasters, they either infringe the copyright just because it’s easier or they don’t use the song at all, depriving the studios and artists of good money.

It needs to be as easy as going online, finding the work you want to license, paying a set fee based on what you’re trying to use it for, downloading it, and using it. I finally found out about the PodSafe Music Network which is trying to do just that. You get the song and then you can use it in a podcast. The only other thing PodSafe needs is more participation. And I think there are only two obstacles to that happening.

The first one is easy. Every recording studio would want to have their own licensing service instead of outsourcing it to a centralized licensor. It doesn’t make it impossible for people who want to license the work, it just requires a bit more research.

The second is a little more complicated. Right holders want to control what their works are being used for. Yael Naïm and her record label don’t want “New Soul” showing up as background music for a porn video (not going to find a link for that one). Having this type of easy licensing makes it impossible to evaluate each individual request so that scenario could come true. So the only other way to make the easy licensing work would be to evaluate each person who wants to license a work, rather than evaluate each licensing request. This would work basically like Google AdSense. A person makes a request to be approved to license works, an employee of the licensing company checks out the podcast (or other type of digital media, I suppose), verifies that it’s not in violation of the licensor’s policies, then approves the person so that they can license whatever they want.

I think that we’re not too far away from that sort of set-up, as the introduction of PodSafe indicates. And the video industry has shown signs that they’re able to adapt quickly enough so they won’t be in the same situation as the music industry in ten years.

In the meantime, I think we’re all watching the slow demise of recording studios and the dawning of a new age where artists and writers don’t have to go through studios because we have the technology to cut out the need for a middle man. There may be a day when I can play whatever I want on View from a Farley!

Spring starts and everyone rushes outside. Spring! Yay! It’s sunny and flowers are blooming. But then there are the people like me who tunnel indoors with allergies. I hide in my room with pills and sprays and eye drops. I’m not alone either. According to the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma, and Immunology, 50 million Americans suffer from some form of allergies. I am lucky enough to have health insurance, but there are millions that don’t.

All of my drugs combined cost about $60 after insurance. But without insurance, it would be prohibitively expensive. A thirty day supply of Allegra-D is $124.92. One bottle of my nasal spray, enough for 60 days, is $105.26. One bottle of eye drops, also good for 60 days, is $99.32. The allergy season for me only lasts about 60 days, so if I didn’t have insurance it would cost $454.42.

And I imagine that it would be a lot worse if I had a problem that was less common or required more drugs. AIDS pills, for example, can cost $30,000 a year! So it occurs to me now that I intended this post, as the title suggests, to be about drug companies. Don’t worry; I’m still sticking to my plan.

So here’s the part that bugs me about the $30,000 AIDS treatment or the $450 allergy meds. It’s the companies themselves! The CEO of Aventis, the maker of Allegra-D made $3.3 million in the 2006 fiscal year. The CEO of Astra-Zeneca made $4 million in the 2007 fiscal year. Their companies are obviously not hurting for cash, so what the heck is going on? Why can’t they provide cheaper treatment for people? Ultimately, people don’t care about allergy medication, but couldn’t they lower the prices on AIDS drugs?

Theoretically, they could. Everyone looks at drug companies as the perfect example of corporate greed and taking advantage of people in need. These companies are in a tough position. They are corporations, not charities, so they need to look after their corporate interest. They need to make a profit and the bigger the better. But they are also dealing with an area where people need these drugs. They can raise prices 300% and people would still buy them because they need them. And they can’t be completely heartless because somebody is bound to get mad. They have to try to reach a middle grounds, but a lot of people feel that they’re still not doing a good job.

It’s worth pointing out, that $4 million is not an outrageous amount in the corporate world. Steve Jobs made $646 million last year. And it’s also worth point out that the pills are expensive to make. 100 tablets of Claritin costs $215, but the ingredients cost only $71. That seems to contradict my last sentence. However, one tablet of Claritin does not cost $0.71. That’s only the manufacturing cost. Pill 1 takes years of research and development. It’s conceivable that a company spend 10 years on one drug and then bag it because it fails in clinical trials. Here’s one fact: A new prescription drug (Claritin is sold in both over-the-counter and prescription doses) costs an average of $897 million to research and develop, according to Tufts University. And only 21.5% of drugs that make it to phase I clinical trials are approved. The $4 million salary isn’t looking so big anymore.

And when companies start taking a look at their annual earnings, they start thinking $4 million isn’t that big either. There have been incidences of falsified clinical trials and improper communication with the FDA. After years of working on a drug, companies are not inclined to eat their losses, so we wind up with cases like this.

I mentioned providing HIV drugs to Africa earlier in this post. That’s a whole different issue for a different post, but I do know that there are difficulties for drug companies and patients. They can’t act like a charity because they have a board of directors, not a board of trustees. The companies have the drugs and the patients need the drugs. There are other matters that complicate it even further. Although this is changing, HIV drugs must be taken at specific times or they become ineffective and drug resistant strains begin to emerge. Without a proper medical infrastructure, it’s impossible to make sure that people are correctly administering their drugs.

Of course, I’m not advocating that we stop helping people in Africa. There’s certainly hope. Most recently, Gilead Sciences and Bristol-Myers Squibb came to an agreement to provide a one pill a day HIV treatment that should go a long way to aiding medical efforts. For a while, companies had been combining only drugs that they owned, so people were taking only 3-5 pills a day. Not too bad in the modern world, but potentially an issue in Africa. This cross-company agreement will help when the pill ships.

So my point is this: Give the drug companies a break. The health system is a big problem, but I don’t think that pharmaceutical companies are the ones the ones creating the problem. They are certainly interested in making a profit, but they do have huge costs and undertake enormous risks. I also hope that they will not try to interfere with the FDA from now on. Trying to find a balance between providing low-cost drugs and delivering to shareholders is difficult, but drug companies do a pretty good job.

If you were patient enough to read the whole thing, please comment!