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Palestinian prime minister Salam Fayyad, known for his moderation and efforts at state-building, retired over the weekend. Matt Duss sums up his legacy to date:

He attempted to reform and develop the Palestinian economy, with a particular focus on greater transparency and accountability, in order create a sense of momentum among Palestinians toward statehood. In one of the surest signs of the Western intelligentsia’s blessing, the doctrine was endowed by The New York Times’ Tom Friedman with its own special title: “Fayyadism … the simple but all-too-rare notion that an Arab leader’s legitimacy should be based not on slogans or rejectionism or personality cults or security services, but on delivering transparent, accountable administration and services.”

Four years later, Fayyadism has foundered on the reality that economic development—genuine, sustainable economic development—is all but impossible amid the conditions of a hostile military occupation that the West Bank continues to experience under Israeli rule.

Beinart argues America and Israel blew their chance to work with a committed moderate leader:

In 2011, after Obama failed to convince Netanyahu to enter peace talks based upon the 1967 lines, Abbas bypassed the U.S.-led peace process and took his case for statehood to the U.N. instead. In 2012, he went there again, and won, in a vote in which America was abandoned by its key allies. Now Fayyad, who for more than a decade has been the most pro-American Palestinian official, is leaving the scene. Unless John Kerry can restart meaningful peace talks—which seems unlikely given Netanyahu’s continued hostility to using the 1967 lines as a benchmark—it’s likely that Abbas will take his case to the International Criminal Court, thus bypassing the United States yet again.

Jack Shakely reviews a new book, With Charity for All, written by former NPR president Ken Stern about the dark side of nonprofits:

His blood-boiling chapter on nonprofit fraud will make you wonder if the IRS ever checks on these miscreants, especially those with the word “veteran” in the title. Well actually, Stern says, it doesn’t. It is the very rare and very unlucky nonprofit thief who gets caught. Less than one percent of all nonprofit tax returns are even reviewed. And nonprofit theft is pervasive, we learn:

The average charitable theft is estimated to be $100,000, meaning that money is walking out in large chunks. Given that the average bank robber in the United States gets away with only about $4,000 and runs a far higher risk of apprehension, one might expect that in a sensible theft marketplace, more people would be attracted to the soft targets of charities.

Previous Dish on Stern’s book here.

A reader adds another horrific and heartbreaking medical condition to this collection:

As someone who last year chose to terminate two pregnancies for massive hydrocephalus (all brain structures blown away by the pressure of the fluid), I find it very frustrating that the discussion of North Dakota’s law banning abortions for genetic defects largely centers on children with mild cases of Down’s Syndrome.  Because the conversation focus is on a trisomy, a case of improperly separated chromosomes that might happen to any couple, but almost certainly only once, it misses the truly spectacular cruelty of this law.

We don’t have a diagnosis, but my husband and I must have a recessive gene that combines to cause hydrocephalus. For every pregnancy, we have a 1 in 4 chance of this happening.

There are lots of diseases like that.  Tay-Sachs is another fatal example. Because of this, I spend a lot of time chatting on an Internet forum with other women in my situation.  They approach their pregnancies in few ways.  Some absolutely know that they will carry to term, with the hope of spending a few moments with their baby while it lives.  Some are so terrified that they use every kind of expensive fertility technology to avoid carrying a baby that carries a fatal flaw.  Those cost tens of thousands of dollars, with no guarantee that the pregnancy will take.  Some women choose to terminate their pregnancies if the genetic test come back wrong or it shows on the anatomy scan.  But they want living children.  They pin their hopes on a 3 in 4 chance of a healthy baby.

One of the women waiting on the genetic test results has a three year old at home on hospice care.  She is terrified of losing another and will terminate if the tests come back wrong.  She can’t watch another die at age three.  One woman had a baby boy who lived to be nearly one before he died.  Her second baby boy died at eight months.  Then she got a diagnosis and was able to test during her third pregnancy – another boy. It had the disease.  She chose to terminate.

The thing I cannot believe is the unbelievable, astounding cruelty of anyone who would dictate her choice in this.  Force her to birth and care for another dying baby?  She knows what that means!  She chose not to!  How can anyone be so cruel that he would tell her she must go through pregnancy, birth, months-long death of her baby before she can try again to have a living child?

Trisomies are one thing, and they are most often fatal.  They do not usually lead to living children that can interact socially. Mostly healthy Down Syndrome children are the exception – not a good example for policy-making. But for almost all couples who come up against that tragedy, a trisomy is a one-off.  The people who face the dilemma of a recessive gene that kills their children, at different paces and with different amounts of pain – those are the people who know what it means to choose to go through with or terminate a pregnancy for genetic reasons.  How dare anyone else tell them which they should do?  Who would give them additional burdens if they get the awful diagnosis?  Who would do that?

Adam Ash toasts David Bowie:

Before him, public figures worked at creating an enduring single persona. Even actors did it — John Wayne as avuncular cowboy; Clara Bow as vamp; Cary Grant as the ideal gentleman date; Humphrey Bogart’s cynical tough guy covering up a morally upright soft heart (when he started off as an upperclass white-tie fop on Broadway). But Bowie said, nope, I’ll create a new self every now and then. In his public personas, Bowie exemplifies the psychological theory which says we consist of various self-states, who need to make peace with one another. Except his self-states are so various, there’s no way they could be integrated.

And the singer is still taking England by storm: 

His first album in 10 years is top of the charts, and a V & A museum exhibition, “David Bowie Is,” devoted to all things Bowie and drawn from his personal archive, is the greatest thing that this august establishment museum has ever put on: double the ticket sales of any previous exhibit in its 160-year-long history. Selfridges has pop-up stores where you can buy Bowie T-shirts and stuff, and there’s a makeup kit for you to Bowie-make-over your quotidian visage. His album is tipped to win the Mercury prize. Not a day goes past that there is not a Bowie pic or article in the popular press. There’s even been an April Fool’s joke about Bowie opening a pet shop called Spiders from Mars, which would sell some of his favorite spiders as pets.

Nate Cohn recently argued that “the long term decline in Democratic fortunes in the South and Appalachia” largely explains why Obama did worse in the more racist parts of the country. Seth Stephens-Davidowitz pushes back:

First, if this were true, any Democrat, not just Obama, should have underperformed in such areas. In early 2008, SurveyUSA polled hypothetical match-ups between each of Obama, Hillary Clinton, and John Edwards and various potential Republican nominees. Obama consistently underperformed among whites in areas with higher racist search rates. Clinton did not. Edwards did not.

Second, if areas with higher racist search rates were punishing all Democrats in 2008, relative to 2004, a similar relationship should be seen in House voting patterns. House Democrats should have also underperformed in these areas in 2008, relative to 2004. They did not.

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A minister criticizes Susan Jacoby for cherry-picking religious arguments:

Why is there polio? Why are there diseases?” If there is a good God why are there these things? The answer of the religious person is “God has a plan we don’t understand.”

That is not the religious answer.  That is a religious answer.  It happens to be a bad answer.  It is bad theology.  Atheism is a rational rejection of bad theology – and more power to them.  But there is also good theology out there – good religious answers which do justice both to our reason and to our spirits.

Why does God allow polio and disease and other bad things to happen to good people?  Because God is not an omnipotent manipulator of the world.  Because God works through the system, not over-powering it.  Because we have free will that allows us to create justice and love, and also evil.  God’s power is not coercive (“you must not do that horrible thing and I will stay your hand”) but patiently persuasive (“there’s a better way, make a better choice”).  God’s “plan” was not to create polio, or human beings, but to set the conditions and watch what we do, and to use that “still, small voice” to gently urge all creation toward divine ideals of deep rich experience, consciousness, love, marvelous beauty, and thoughtful theology.

As any teenage theologian can see, the idea of a simultaneously all-powerful and all-loving God is impossible based on the evidence of the tragedies that befall us everyday.  But there is better theology available.  The churches should be better teachers.  And atheists shouldn’t give up so soon.

Another reader views her youthful conversion to atheism as simply a step in her lifelong spiritual development:

During those early years it is not just typical but imperative for intellectual development to question all received wisdom. Everything that once made sense no longer does. Faith in God is a great example of that because it is taught to children when ultimately, to be authentic, it must be felt.

But the years after do something to us. We have hard times and unexpected joys and we begin to see nuance and complexity where everything had previously been so black and white. We’re humbled by this, by the sense that what we accepted may have been wrong, that we are and always will be a work in progress. For many people, that means discovering faith in a more mature and meaningful sense than what we were given as children.

I certainly followed that trajectory. As a teen and young adult, God just didn’t make sense to me. I couldn’t understand how anyone could believe that irrational nonsense. But at some point in middle age, as I negotiated the rough contours of my life, I began a kind of inner dialogue – sometimes accusatory and angry and sometimes grateful – with, I thought, myself. Eventually I realized I was engaging in a personal relationship with God. And once I understood that, fully grasped it, atheism just didn’t make sense to me anymore. Once again, everything that had made sense to me no longer did. I have a faith that I never thought I would have.

One reader takes issue with Jacoby’s tone:

My beef is actually with Susan Jacoby and the flippant way that she deals with the conversion of Paul. The problem with atheists has always been that they pride themselves on having discovered ‘the truth’ and hence also accord themselves the licence to belittle people of faith. In Susan’s words, ‘A voice appears out of the sky, you fall off your horse, you hit yourself on the head, and when you wake up you know Jesus is the lord.’ To deal with the conversion of Saul in such a disparaging way is why people of faith have no patience with the logic put forth by atheists. Saul didn’t fall down from his horse and hit his head and wake up a loony. I can take any text from any book and put forth the same derisiveness. All it requires is a little sarcasm and cynicism.

According to the Bible, you don’t need to worship stones and trees or have Gods with exotic names like Baal and Astaroth. When atheists are unwilling to entertain an opposing thought and are dogged about their determination to have converts, then it’s just another religion.

Another reader focuses on Saul’s conversion, and describes his similarly sudden conversion to atheism while visiting Mecca:

There I was in the middle of the teeming masses, observing an essentially pagan pilgrimage co-opted by Islam to gain the support of Mecca’s merchant class whose livelihoods had depended on it, a fact conveniently ignored/forgotten by most Muslims. And it hit me right there and then! None of this made any sense! NONE! Why are we going around this big black cube? Why do we have to pray five times a day? If God is all-knowing and all-powerful, surely he doesn’t need us to reaffirm our faith in him five times a day.

I left Mecca with the firm conviction that I was better off not worrying. I was already 40 years old, and I had a strong sense of right and wrong, and how to live the best life I could possibly live and how to be the best human being I could possibly be; a work in progress admittedly. I guess I had a Damascene conversion in Mecca!

Another points to Ricky Gervais (in the above video) as a similar “Damascene convert.”