No special rights for religion: three churchless thumbs-up

Here's three godless good news pieces that popped into my web browser recently. 

I liked Russ Belville's (a.k.a. Radical Russ) "No More Special Rights for Religion" a lot.

I learned about Belville, who lives in Portland, via our shared interest in supporting Measure 91 -- which was passed by voters this month, leading to legalized recreational marijuana in Oregon.

Along with him, I've also wondered why religious reasons for doing this or that should get more legal standing than personal reasons for doing this or that. After all, holding a religious belief is a personal decision. Why should it be treated as deserving of more respect than a non-religious belief?

Excerpt:

Why do people who claim belief in something objectively unprovable get a free pass for their silly superstitions? You don’t have to be Sikh or Rastafarian or Mormon or Muslim, it is a creed you choose to live by. That creed may require sacrifices of you, like not shaving, smoking weed, wearing sacred undergarments, or praying prostrate five times a day. Great, make your sacrifices, live your life.

But why do these people then demand that public, secular institutions bend to conform to their silly superstitions based on a non-existent authority? What, the Sikh should be able to keep his long hair and beard and funny hat in the Army, but the hippie shouldn’t? Because the Sikh says God told him to, but the hippie says he just prefers it? Sorry, hippie, your own preferences don’t matter; you should have picked a mythological authority to back you up?

If your belief system, your creed, contains inviolate articles of behavior that are inconsistent with a public institution’s inviolate articles of behavior, at what point does the believer’s faith require sacrifices like being unable to join the military? If this guy were fighting for anyone to have long hair, beards, and funny hats in the military, he’d have my respect. Instead, he just wants a special exemption to the rules because he subscribes to a certain mythology.

Another Oregon story struck a blow for common sense: "Atheists Score Major Win in Federal Court." The subject here is akin to what Belville talked about above -- making sincerely-held non-godly beliefs and ethical values equivalent to religious beliefs in the eye of the law.

On Thursday, October 30, Senior District Judge Ancer Haggerty issued a ruling on American Humanist Association v. United States, a case that was brought by the American Humanist Association (AHA) and Jason Holden, a federal prisoner. Holden pushed for the lawsuit because he wanted Humanism — which the AHA defines as “an ethical and life-affirming philosophy free of belief in any gods and other supernatural forces” — recognized as a religion so that his prison would allow for the creation of a Humanist study group.

Haggerty sided with the plaintiffs in his decision, citing existing legal precedent and arguing that denying Humanists the same rights as groups such as Christianity would be highly suspect under the Establishment Clause in the U.S. Constitution, which declares that Congress “shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.”

Lastly, what's not to like about... "Satanic Temple challenges policy allowing religious materials to be distributed at public schools."

Hey, if we truly have religious freedom in this country, every religion (and also belief system, in my opinion) needs to be treated equally. Some people revere God; others Satan; still others, their personal values.

Each to his own, since there is no proof that either God or Satan are anything other than imaginary.

The Orange County School Board in Florida currently allows religious groups to distribute religious material, such as Bibles, at public high schools. Atheists sought the same right — to counter the distribution of Bibles — and won. But the school board decided that things had “gotten out of hand” when members of The Satanic Temple recently announced that they wanted to disseminate material on the “philosophy and practice of Satanism.”

The board will vote in the next few months on whether to alter or eliminate the policy. Perhaps ironically, the Satanic Temple will applaud if religious materials are banned because it believes strongly in the separation of church and state.

Comments

[Appreciative Reader]

Loved this article.

Such an obvious point of view, this : that religion deserves no special treatment : yet how often this obvious view is not so obvious to people!

I agree fully with you, but let me play devil's advocate and ask a contrary question, merely in order to examine this issue from all angles :

What about special needs of groups like homosexuals? Are homosexuals any different from congenital believers (and, by extension, congenital believers in some particular religion)?

I don't even know if gays demand any special treatment (they do demand non-discrimination, which is their right, and a different thing altogether) : but if they did (or do) demand special treatment and/or privileges, then would that be justified?

[Walker]

It's not obvious that you or Belville have ever served in the military.

The purpose of a uniform is to promote the eradication of individual identity and help erase the idea of the service member as a singular entity.

The US military used to struggle with religious attire conflicts, but then figured out that service members who were already into much bigger systems of control were much easier to manage and incorporate into the unit system of subordinated individual identity.

The "hippie" attire is much more of a problem for the military than a turban or skullcap or whatever because the individual doesn't choose the religious garb -- it's dictated to them, and wearing it is obedience. Wisely, the military figured out that by allowing people their religious garb, they actually reinforce the military's own goals, by melding another powerful entity's method of control with the military's.

[cc]

the Satanic Temple...believes strongly in the separation of church and state.

Thereby showing that they're the least devilish of all religions.

[Appreciative Reader]

Okay, talking of the army and special rights for religion, here’s what strikes me:

Which is by far the most egregious example of religious nutjobs getting their way? Why, the state of Israel, that’s what.

Now no doubt those guys (or at least, their grandfathers) got one really lousy deal under the Nazis. No gainsaying that. (You need to preface your remarks about our Hebrew friends by saying that if you aspire to be at all politically correct, just like you need to latch on a peace-be-unto-him after the name of the murderous and polygamous founder of the craziest religion in the history of mankind. Well I’ve done my politically correct duty by invoking the horrors of Auschwitz--which, incidentally, was truly horrible, and cursing Hitler the Horrible, and so back to what I was saying.)

Talk about the entitlement of religious nutjobs! Why (apart from the realpolitik and all that) did the state Israel come to be? At best, dodgy history dating back some 2,500 years or so (by which logic each and every nation existing today ought to be carved up and our political world map redesigned into something entirely unrecognizable). That was the “at best” explanation. The actual (and infinitely more probable) explanation is, to humor some basket case fanatics and their book of nursery rhymes and fairy tales.

And the question arises : If the one, then why not the other? If you tip your hat to the Israeli state, then why would you not salaam that murderous psycho Abu Bakr, and recognize him as the true Caliph and true political representative of the equally murderous founder of his psychotic faith?

Of course all of this is nonsense. Of course all of this ought to stop. But where does one start, if one is to keep anything like a holistic perspective? How does one come off not looking an out-and-out hypocrite in attempting to set our world right from its superstitious foundations?

[Appreciative Reader]

Brian, just a general housekeeping question/suggestion : I enjoy going through the very interesting exchanges of comments that sometimes come up here. The older posts are the best for that, but my question is : how does one see what posts are being commented on at this time? You get only the 10 most recent comments on the sidebar (yes, I've read your blog post on this topic).

Now when I get to your site, then besides reading your posts of course, I also like to see what topics people are commenting on. So is there any way to click on a link or something and see a whole list of recent comments? (I couldn't see any such link.)

No (lest you ask), I don't like to subscribe to comments. That simply clogs up my email. I generally visit your site once or twice a week, and it would be cool if one could see what people've been talking about since my last visit. (If it isn't very involved or difficult for you, naturally! I have no knowledge of coding, so I don't know how this works.)

[Brian Hines]

Appreciative Reader, for quite a few years I've asked TypePad (the blogging service I use) to add the feature that you are requesting. Obviously they haven't done this. I keep telling them that just listing the ten most recent comments isn't good enough.

As you said, this doesn't help much in knowing which posts have gotten the most commenting activity recently. Sometimes a few commenters "suck up" most of the recent comment list.

I try to moderate this by not publishing repetitive, non-substantive, or purely personal comments, but that doesn't help much, since some people mistake leaving comments on a blog post with messaging. Meaning, they use comments as a way to communicate with someone else, which really isn't very appropriate.

I'll share your comment with TypePad staff. Maybe this will spur them to add the commenting feature that they should have given us subscribers a long time ago.

[One Initiated]

Brian,

I was going through their KB and it's been listed here:
http://help.typepad.com/default_template_modules.html#recent-comments

You can increase the "lastn" in the recent_comments module script, and it will show the list of comments as mentioned by the "lastn" value. So, you can increase the number of comments shown.

Also, I think instead of having it on the sidebar, maybe you can create a dedicated page "Recent Comments" and have the link on the top navigation bar, and in the body content of that page, you can add the recent_comment modules' script so it will start showing the 50 or 100 comments titles on that page's content.

regards,
One Initiated

[Brian Hines]

One Initiated, thanks for looking into this. The approach you laid out requires fiddling around with the HTML/CSS/whatever coding for my blog. Not being expert in this, I likely would have to pay TypePad to do it for me. A possibility, but I'm not wild about making changes to the blog that I wouldn't be able to undo or change on my own easily.

I left a support ticket with Typepad about this subject and got a response. Yeah, it sound like a "form letter," but at least its something:

"Thanks for reaching out. These sounds like good suggestions and we'll definitely add them to our requests. We have some big things coming up that we're hard at work on and you can get updates via
http://everything.typepad.com "