Church of the Churchless

No, Ammon Bundy, that voice in your head isn't God

Religious craziness is a form of socially-acceptable insanity.

Case in point: Ammon Bundy is one of the militants who have taken over buildings at the federal Malheur Wildlife Refuge in eastern Oregon. 

Here's a short 90-second excerpt from a longer video Bundy made where he talks about what led him to try to help Dwight and Steven Hammond, ranchers in Harney County who were convicted on arson charges when they burned rangeland illegally -- endangering hunters and firefighters.

 

Somehow Bundy believes that when he needed to clear his mind about what to do, it was the Lord who did this for him. (Me, I've found a nap and coffee work just fine without God.)

Bundy also says that with his mind all clear, he understood how the Lord felt about the Hammonds. And the Lord wasn't pleased about how they'd been treated by government prosecutors, a jury, and the courts.

Now, ordinarily if someone claims that an Invisible Friend left messages in their mind to do this-and-that, we'd be inclined to think that's crazy. 

But if a religious person asserts that God is the Invisible Friend, a cloak of cultural OK'ness protects them from most criticism. 

Except from secular skeptics like me. 

I'm 99.99% sure that the voice Ammon Bundy heard in his head came from him, not God. Hey, I've got mental voices speaking to me all the time, as we all do. But since they sound just like me, and almost always are in tune with the way I see the world, I correctly conclude that my urge to do something emanates from moi. 

Which is both psychologically true and socially beneficial. 

Because what Bundy says in this video isn't far removed from how Islamic terrorists and other fundamentalist extremists see reality. They also believe that God is impelling them to engage in certain acts.

Granted, so far Ammon Bundy and his band of Malheur Wildlife Refuge occupiers haven't harmed anyone. However, they're armed. And previously the Bundy family was the centerpiece of an faceoff between federal officials and militants that came dangerously close to a shooting war.

Imagining that God is telling you to do something adds a lot of fuel to an extremist fire. An Oregonian story discusses the relation between religion and militancy in "Oregon militants: Why the Bundys' Mormonism matters."

"The Lord was not pleased with what was happening to the Hammonds," Bundy said in the video. "If we allowed the Hammonds to continue to be punished, there would be accountability."

Bundy and his brothers were among hundreds who protested Saturday on behalf of the Hammonds and later led a group of about 20 to take over an office at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge.

One militant interviewed by Oregon Public Broadcasting only identifies himself as Captain Moroni, a historic general who, according to church scripture, threatened to "stir up insurrections" and fight "until those who have desires to usurp power and authority shall become extinct" because he felt the government did not care about the country's freedom.

"I do not fear your power nor your authority, but it is my God whom I fear," Moroni said in the Book of Alma, "and it is according to his commandments that I do take my sword to defend the cause of my country."

An Oregon Public Broadcasting piece, "The Bundy Militia's Particular Brand of Mormonism," also dives into the Bundys' religious beliefs.

“I’m Captain Moroni, from Utah.”  

That’s how one militiaman at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge responded to OPB’s Amanda Peacher when she asked for his name.

That name is not a silly response to deflect responsibility: In many ways, it encapsulates a deeply intertwined anti-federal sentiment mixed with Mormon symbolism. Captain Moroni is a crucial figure in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He’s also a heroic figure for anti-federalist extremists.  

In the modern day west, Captain Moroni has become one of several powerful symbols for the Bundy militia’s anti-governmental extremism.

After Ammon Bundy called on militants to join him in Oregon, the OPB story says: "The man identifying as Captain Moroni said he was inspired by the call, and that the inspiration was validated by God in the form of a flock of geese he saw flying."

Well, I live near the Ankeny National Wildlife Refuge in western Oregon. I see geese flying overhead all the time. Yet I've never used this as a reason to claim God wants me to do something. 

That would be freaking crazy. Unless you're religious. 

"Our God is a Woman! Our Mission is Protest! Our Weapon are bare breasts!"

FEMEN International has a good slogan -- the title of this post. 

Recently they made good on those words, as described in "Topless female protesters manhandled after disrupting Islamic conference in France." 

Members of a feminist protest group known for storming events topless has disrupted an Islamic conference in France and caught what appears to be a bit of a beating in the process.

...Even right-wing media sites like Breitbart were impressed when two young women, sans shirts, took the stage last weekend at what was billed as a “Muslim salon” in Pontoise, France, a town just outside of Paris. The salon, as Buzzfeed reported, included a conversation about “Women’s valuation in Islam.”

In dramatic video that’s not exactly safe for work, the women take the lectern and start shouting in French: “Nobody enslaves me, nobody owns me, I’m my own prophet.” Messages written on their chests — a Femen trademark — offered similar messages.

“The two activists (both coming from Muslim families) [gave voice to] hundreds of women, feminists, and associations, all disgusted by this public hate speeches,” the group wrote on Facebook. “It was our duty to interrupt this enslavement event, and to let a scream of freedom be heard in the middle of their submission lessons.”

The women were quickly escorted offstage. But the escorting seemed to turn into a scuffle as a number of men began kicking the women once they were down.

Here's the video. Great way to protest religious absurdity.

 

Naturalism needs to rule public policy debates

Below is an essay that I wrote for the Spiritual Naturalist Society (I'm a contributing writer), but which struck them as too political for their tastes -- politics and policy-making apparently not being part of what they consider to be a "spiritual practice." 

So, boo-hoo, it was rejected for their site.

I'm going to present some arguments to the Spiritual Naturalist Society folks about why no bounds should be placed around a naturalistic worldview. If there is no supernatural realm, it doesn't make sense to me to consider some aspects of a naturalistic person's life to be spiritual, and some aspects non-spiritual.

I meditate every morning. I go for a walk in nature every day. I do Tai Chi almost every day.

If these activities are "spiritual," then why isn't writing elected officials to advocate for some policy position, such as signing the deal with Iran or doing more to avert global climate change, or testifying at a city council meeting?

And also, fighting the interjection of faith-based supernatural religious beliefs into public policy debates, which, as you'll read below, was a big part of what our nation's revolutionary deistically-inclined founders strongly held to be true and good.

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Naturalism needs to rule public policy debates

There’s no place for supernatural religious beliefs in discussions of public policy.

So, please, believers, leave out all mentions of God, soul, spirit, divine will, and such when you want to weigh in on abortion, embryonic stem cell research, LBGTQ rights, or other morally-fraught issues.

Being a political activist, my Christian friends (whether liberal or conservative) recoil when I speak like this. They feel it is fine to express their religious views in debates about how government should deal with matters of public policy.

I disagree.

After reading Matthew Stewart’s marvelously written and researched book, “Nature’s God: The Heretical Origins of the American Republic,” I’ve got fresh argumentative ammunition to bolster my long-held contention that religious views founded on supernaturalism shouldn’t be brought into the public sphere.

(See my 2004 blog post, Religious values have no place in politics.)

The founders of our nation intended the United States to be an Empire of Reason. Stewart writes:

Human beings achieved self-government only after they learned how to discard the politically dangerous delusions that arise from the common religious consciousness. At least, that is more or less how America’s founders saw the matter.

…The cultivation of the sciences and the development of culture and the arts become not just the route to advancing the other interests of the state but the end of the state itself.

The enlightenment of the people becomes their own true religion, while the shell of tradition vanishes into empty symbols of the life of individual and collective self-realization.

True piety in a reasonable world is the pursuit of happiness through the improvement of the understanding. Call it the religion of freedom.

Stewart dives into some deep historical and philosophical waters in “Nature’s God.” Its 435 pages aren’t the easiest to read or summarize succinctly.

So here’s a couple of metaphors that, to me, do a good job of showing why Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Benjamin Franklin, Ethan Allen, Thomas Young, and other leaders during revolutionary times worked so hard to make reason, not faith, the foundation of our nation’s governance.

Imagine that you’re part of a residents’ committee charged with managing the common property of a housing development. The group is looking at a grove of trees, some of which may need to be removed to restore views.

A member of the committee interrupts the discussion. “I’m not in favor of taking down any trees,” she says. “I believe there are tree sprites, invisible fairies, living in them. The sprites would be harmed if any tree was removed.”

How could you respond to that? You want to tell the woman, “What you’re saying is crazy,” but that would sound impolite.

So you reply with, “Well, you’re welcome to your beliefs, but this committee is responsible for doing what’s best for our community. We have to base our tree removal decisions on what everybody knows to be real, not on the supposed desires of supernatural tree sprites.”

This is closely akin to how many religious people approach the question of abortion.

They believe that an immaterial soul enters the embryo at the moment of conception, or soon thereafter. Other people look upon abortion as a secular matter, a decision to be reached between a woman and her doctor based on personal moral and health concerns.

Once fervently-held religious supernaturalism enters a public policy discussion, it is difficult, if not impossible, to engage in an open debate where reasoned arguments are put forth, factual evidence carefully considered, and a fairly-arrived at decision determined.

Consider this second metaphorical example.

A group is playing poker. A hand has been dealt. The cards have been played. Everything is on the table for examination. A player with four aces prepares to pull in the chips she has won. Until she hears…

“Stop. I won this hand. I’ve got a straight flush, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 of clubs.”
“No, you don’t. We can all see your cards. You’ve got nothing.”
“Ah, those aren’t my real cards. My real cards are invisible. Only I can see them — give me the chips I’ve won.”

Who would do that?

The game has been played fairly. The only cards that count are the physical ones handed out by the dealer. There are rules for deciding which combinations of cards win out over other combinations. If someone brings in supernatural invisible cards, this makes playing a fair game of poker impossible.

Though I’ve used simple examples of tree cutting and poker playing, the same principles were at the root of why the American Republic was founded as a naturalistic Empire of Reason rather than a supernatural Empire of Faith.

Here’s another passage from “Nature’s God” where Stewart speaks of how our nation’s founders viewed private and public religiosity.

The separation of church and state that emerges from the early modern revolutions in philosophy and politics does not in fact imply that the modern secular state is or ought to be neutral with respect to religion in every sense of that term. Rather, this separation at least implicitly involves the creation of a certain kind of public religion.

This new public religion is indeed tolerant of every religious belief -- but only insofar as that belief is understood to be intrinsically private. It does not and ought not tolerate any form of religion that attempts to hold the power of the sovereign answerable to its private religious belief. It also does not and ought not tolerate any attempt to shield the doctrines and practices of any religion from critical scrutiny.

…In short, the state may adopt as a part of its public religion only whatever may be safely dissolved back into reason.

In the context of the American Revolution, Stewart’s mention of a sovereign doesn't refer to a king, queen, president, parliament, or congress. Rather, it means the people of the newly formed United States.

Thus it is the power of the people that isn’t obliged to answer to any private religious belief.

If someone tries to interject a faith-based doctrine that isn’t answerable to reason into a public policy question, this is as inappropriate as someone arguing that a tree can’t be cut down because of supernatural sprites, or claiming to have won a hand of poker because of invisible cards.

Here’s a succinct explanation of what Stewart means by “public religion.” Basically, it is deism, which in his conception isn’t far removed from atheism, being a naturalistic view of the universe.

The popular deism or natural religion that America's revolutionaries hoped to promote was distinguished above all by its commitment to the defining value of the Empire of Reason: the improvement of the understanding.

Thus the goal of these radical nation-building philosophers wasn’t so much to exclude God from the American Republic, as to include all of reality. This is the only way genuine understanding of what is true and good can be achieved.

In keeping with the guiding principle, it [an immanent rather than transcendent view of morality] says that whatever moves us, like whatever moves anything in the infinite universe, must be explicable. So the good always comes with reasons for its goodness; those reasons must refer to those motives that we generically identify as pleasure and pain; and those reflections on the affections can always be the subject of further reflection, elaboration, and qualification.

Given the diversity of these United States, our Constitution — as serious as it is — reminds me of a joke that begins with “A Christian, Jew, Buddhist, Hindu, Atheist, Wiccan, Muslim, Taoist, and Rastafarian walk into a bar…”

Except, the bar is our nation. And there are many more types of citizens than the nine I mentioned. One could argue, as many types as there are individuals living in this country, since every person is unique.

What is the common ground on which we all can stand during our debates and discussions about what is best for us?

What evidence and facts can be brought into attempts to reason our way to some sort of consensus on complex controversial issues?

The answer to both questions is Nature and Nature’s Laws. Everybody lives in the same natural world. We all breathe the same air, drink the same water, walk on the same Earth, gaze into the same sky.

Yes, humans also hold a wide variety of ideas about what, if anything, might lie beyond the physicality of this universe.

But those hypothesized supernatural conceptions divide us, while the actuality of science, and the understanding that flows from reasoned consideration of what is known to be real — that unites us.

Such was the unparalleled vision of our nation’s founders. Near the end of his book, Matthew Stewart speaks of what remains for this vision to be fulfilled.

In our tolerant age, we like to say that everybody is entitled their own worldview, that every worldview comes with its own “narrative” of the history, and that all such narratives are created equal.

So, according to the wisdom of polite society today, it’s a matter of personal preference whether the modern world emerged out of humankind’s emancipation from the shackles of religious superstition or whether instead it sprang directly from the head of Zeus, or was delivered in the form of a bountiful continent to this or that group of sectarian zealots.

But the only choice we really have is whether to be conscious or to persist in destructive delusions. Of course, it remains just as fashionable now as it was in Jonathan Edward’s day to lament the nihilism that supposedly grips us when we shed the false certainty of ignorance, and to bemoan the doom that will surely befall us when we depart from the simple faith of our fathers.

But the fact remains that the common power of humanity — the capability for cooperative action that is really just another word for our moral well-being — was never greater than after we lost our religion.

…The founding of the American Republic did not bring freedom to the slaves. It did not give justice to Native Americans. It did nothing to liberate women. And it still hasn’t prevented malefactors of great wealth from twisting the political process to their advantage. 

All of these struggles fell to subsequent generations, and the provisional victories obtained thus far have been the work of those who have understood in one way or another that the American Revolution remains an ongoing concern.

The main thing we can learn now from the persistence in modern America of supernatural religion and the reactionary nationalism with which it is so regularly accompanied is that there is still work to be done. For too long we have relied on silence to speak a certain truth. The noise tells us the time has come for some candor. It points to a piece of unfinished business of the American Revolution.

More quotations from "Nature's God," a marvelously insightful book

I can't describe how much I enjoyed reading Matthew Stewart's book, Nature's God: The Heretical Origins of the American Republic. It isn't the easiest book I've ever read, to put it mildly. 

Stewart dives deep into historical and philosophical waters in the book's 435 pages. At times I wondered why he was paying so much attention to a certain subject. But by the end of "Nature's God" I understood, pretty much, how each chapter contributed to his literary goal.

Which, basically, was to dispel the myth of the United States being founded as a Christian nation. Or more broadly, as a religious nation. In truth, this country was founded as an Empire of Reason. 

I've written several blog posts about the book, here, here, and here. As with my first post, mostly filled with quotations from "Nature's God," I've done the same in this post -- starting at the point in the book that I left off with in the first set of quotations.

Stewart is just a freaking brilliant author.

Like I said, his book takes some effort to understand. You have to fit together a bunch of historical and philosophical pieces to get a good glimpse of the picture that is the foundation of the American Revolution and our constitution.

In the quotations below, I particularly enjoyed Stewart's discussion of how the founders of this country distinguished between private and public religion. This supported a post on my other blog, "Religious views have no place in fetal tissue debate."

Enjoy. Read slowly. Then consider reading the quotations over again. I've had to do this. Repeated readings sometimes are needed to really fathom what Stewart is getting at, for me at least.

All virtue, according to this line of thought, is a matter of pursuing one's genuine interest or self-realization. It supposes an awareness of oneself, and of every aspect of one's actual life, in the present. It is not far from what in the Buddhist tradition is called "mindfulness."

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More dramatically, Spinoza tells us that we do not desire or detest things because we judge them to be good or evil; we judge them good or evil because we desire or detest them.

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So the good always comes with reasons for its goodness; those reasons must refer to those motives that we generically identify as pleasure and pain; and those reflections on the affections can always be the subject of further reflection, elaboration, and qualification. 

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A still deeper insight embodied in the radical conception is that our knowledge of good and evil, such as it is, cannot be replaced with a thoughtless calculation delivered by some moral theory on the basis of some fixed set of rules, for it must follow from our awareness of the interconnections of things in the universe as a whole, taken without limit.

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The radical philosophy at the origin of liberal modernity, then, is not properly speaking (or exclusively) a humanism. It is closer to a naturalism that might one day be expected to embrace all species, a planet, and perhaps the universe itself.

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Thus: to complete the logic: if vice turned out to be a condition of happiness, then presumably God would clamor to see us vicious.

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For good and evil are nothing but pleasure and pain insofar as we are conscious of them.

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If one were to rummage through the history of philosophy for the words that might express the moral wisdom at the core of American liberalism -- the knowledge that we realize ourselves individually and collectively not by bemoaning our depravity and abasing ourselves before inscrutable deities but through the improvement of the understanding that brings with it both pleasure and virtue -- it would be difficult to find a more apt phrase than the one Jefferson placed at the heart of the Declaration of Independence: the pursuit of happiness.

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But today we don't really need to wonder what a society founded on the principles of atheism would look like. We just need to understand aright the history of the United States.

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Liberalism in its original form is not the elaboration of some common moral intuition, the articulation of an arbitrary creed or cultural formation, or a theory of justice. It is a theory of power. Its principal claim is that the source of human power and freedom is the understanding. It rests in an essential way on the same radical philosophy that begins with Nature's God and passes through nature's virtue.

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The radical political philosophy that guided the American Revolution, on the other hand, begins not with this common assertion of the moral equality of human beings but with an explicit denial of the premise concerning the natural inequality of human beings. Human equality begins in nature, it says, not in moral imperatives.

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The demand for equality among beings that are naturally equal is really just the demand that all power should explain itself. A justice that comes from nature is in essence a justice that comes with reasons and is therefore subject to explanation and revision. It is this insistence on explanation -- not any moralistic imperative to be nice to other people, nor the appeal to arbitrary and unreliable feelings of empathy arising out of the human breast -- that would make the Enlightenment such a revolutionary force in human history.

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The Empire of Reason, to be clear, does not contain or restrict nature but realizes it, and so it is also, by definition, the most powerful form of state. It maximizes the freedom or power of the individual, insofar as we understand freedom or power as rational self-determination (as opposed to the satisfaction of passions). But the rational self-determination or power of the individual, as we know from radical ethics, is in fact coextensive with the rational self-determination of the collective.

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The radical freedom of thought begins with the claim that the mind is not in fact free to affirm or deny ideas at will, but is rather constrained to follow the evidence and reasons presented to it. The mind achieves its freedom, according to this line of thought, by pursuing reasons and evidence toward a more perspicuous understanding of itself, its own body, and the world around it. The mind needs its ideas in the same sense that the body needs to appropriate pieces of the outside world in order to generate itself.

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Not grasping that power is nothing but the understanding itself, human beings naturally tend to anthropomorphize it. Power, they tend to think, always belongs to the kind of thing that has a proper name. So they confuse the political power of their own collective with that of the king or institution that happens to wield it, in the very same way that they confuse the collective power of all things in nature with that of a presiding deity, to which they give the name of God.

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The common ideas about things make it especially difficult to see how it is that the sovereign, as distinct from government, may be identified with the people.

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The most obvious general principle of democracy is that it finds one way or another to give all individuals an equal voice in public affairs.

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The common religious consciousness supposes that right belief alone is the foundation for right action, and so it concludes that good religion is the necessary foundation of good government... The radical philosophers, on the other hand, say that understanding, not belief, is the source of all morality, and that the reasonable state embodies this understanding in its laws.

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America's founders were functionally unanimous in their conviction that good government starts with human beings as they are -- mostly irrational and hence vicious -- and produces virtue by relying not on acts of conscience but on acts of law.

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Tyranny happens when a society turns against itself, with one part usurping the power of whole and applying it to the exploitation of the rest.

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The opposite of the Empire of Reason is in reality the Empire of Faith. Hobbes calls it "the Kingdom of the Fairies"; in more modern terms, we could say that the opposite of democracy is theocracy.

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Thus, superstition permits individuals suffering from one set of passions to feed off individuals suffering from another according to a logic that neither side understands, and in this manner society lacerates itself in a fury of thoughtless self-destruction. 

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No proposition could have elicited more support from the radical precursors to the American Revolution than that the priests are the chief instrument of tyrants.

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Human beings achieved self-government only after they learned how to discard the politically dangerous delusions that arise from the common religious consciousness. At least, that is more or less how America's founders saw the matter.

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The equality that Jefferson announced and that Lincoln partially advanced is at bottom the demand that all power must explain itself. In reality, the revolutionary force in the Declaration of Independence is the guiding principle of philosophy.

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Every thing in the universe strives to persist in being, say the radical philosophers, and the power of nature through which the human mind strives to persist is the power of the understanding.

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From the radical position that Locke and Spinoza share, it follows that religion is not a fundamental category of human experience for legal or political purposes in either its public or its private aspects.

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The separation of church and state that emerges from the early modern revolutions in philosophy and politics does not in fact imply that the modern secular state is or ought to be neutral with respect to religion in every sense of that term. Rather, this separation at least implicitly involves the creation of a certain kind of public religion.

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This new public religion is indeed tolerant of every religious belief -- but only insofar as that belief is understood to be intrinsically private. It does not and ought not tolerate any form of religion that attempts to hold the power of the sovereign answerable to its private religious belief. It also does not and ought not tolerate any attempt to shield the doctrines and practices of any religion from critical scrutiny.

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In short, the state may adopt as a part of its public religion only whatever may be safely dissolved back into reason.

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The important point is that such false religion remains confined to the private sphere, as a purely inward matter, where it is rendered harmless by the same civil laws that forbid the state from attempting to interfere with it.

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It is precisely because they identify religion with its purely private or inward aspect that Jefferson and Madison insist that government can neither restrict nor impose it through an establishment of religion.

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It alerts us to the fact that behind the definition of religion as a purely private affair there stands another religion, or a sense of piety, and this object of this ur-religion, or true piety, is not any particular deity or doctrine but the pursuit of understanding itself.

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In short, they [the founders of this country] wanted to bestow upon America the blessings of popular deism, or that variety of religion that translates into lively metaphors and memorized rituals the radical and essentially atheistic philosophy on which the modern liberal state rests.

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Jefferson was certain that priestcraft and its paraphernalia of mystifying dogma would wither under the disinfecting light of the new empire of reason.

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The popular deism or natural religion that America's revolutionaries hoped to promote was distinguished above all by its commitment to the defining value of the Empire of Reason: the improvement of the understanding.

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It is only to the degree that religion is not what it once was, moreover, that we can and ought to tolerate it, and may hope to find in it some limited utility for modern society.

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America's mainstream religion is at bottom one form or another of popular deism, and popular deism is just atheism adapted to the limitations of the common understanding of things. To say that the United States is a "one nation under God" is to conceal behind a euphemism the fact that it is and always has been one nation under nature. Whatever else we pretend to believe, we are in practice mostly atheists now -- and for that we should be grateful.

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The best account of the spread of secularism remains the one that Jefferson first suggested: that it is the natural consequence of the freedom of thought in a free society. Not the orbits of the planets or the origin of the species but the daily movement of social, moral, and political experience in the modern world has made secularism inevitable.

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To attempt to explain the world today through the experience of the common religious consciousness is to live in a kind of moral chaos. It is to inhabit a house of fractured mirrors, where submission to inscrutable authorities counts as freedom, where that which is good for the health of the individual and the collective is called evil, and where all are expected to bear the lifelong burden of pretending to believe one thing while doing another.

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Once upon a time, it took a certain kind of genius to see that atheists could be virtuous. Today, only those blinded by bigotry can think otherwise. The revolutionaries of the early modern period needed their books to imagine a world free from the chains of the common religious consciousness. Today we need only our eyes.

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Ideas are acts of understanding. They derive their power from their truth, not their acceptance. They involve clearing away old delusions, not erecting new ones. They don't settle the future; they only make sense of the past. They are the ground of our freedom, not an instance of it. And the history of the past several hundred years shows that ideas in this sense did change the world.

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Self-governance became possible -- however imperfectly -- only after radical philosophy cleared the field of those common misconceptions through which human beings participate in their own enslavement. 

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But the fact remains that the common power of humanity -- the capability for cooperative action that is really just another word for our moral well-being -- was never greater than after we lost our religion.

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The main thing we can learn now from the persistence in modern America of supernatural religion and the reactionary nationalism with which it is so regularly accompanied is that there is still work to be done. For too long we have relied on silence to speak a certain truth. The noise tells us the time has come for some candor. It points to a piece of unfinished business of the American Revolution.

America's founders reasoned their way to a secular republic

How did the United States come to be the secular constitutional republic -- arguably also termed a democracy -- that it is now? Why aren't we ruled by a king or queen? Why aren't we a theocracy?

I've vaguely been interested in these sorts of questions, but I'm not a big history buff. So reading Matthew Stewart's book, Nature's God: The Heretical Origins of the American Republic, is pretty much my first serious venture into learning about my country's revolutionary origins.

In my last post I shared a bunch of quotations from the book. Here I want to take a stab at relating what I've learned so far (I've still got about fifty pages to read) in my own words, without quoting from "Nature's God."

After all, when I finish the book the usable part of the contents will be in my mind. It is less important that I understand exactly what Stewart is arguing, as that I understand it in my own way. So here's my reasoned take on some core themes of "Nature's God."

People often say that many of the leaders of the American Revolution were deists, rather than theists. This is true. They didn't believe in a personal god who took a special interest in earthly affairs. Or any affairs within the universe.

Their god basically was synonymous with nature. Thus understanding the laws of nature was the best way to understand God. 

Knowledge doesn't come from some transcendent source. It is immanent, not transcendent. Meaning, we humans have the means to know reality via our senses, reasoning, experimentation, observation, analysis, and all the other characteristics of the "scientific method," broadly speaking.

Morality also is immanent. As is knowing how to be happy.

If we act in accord with Nature's Laws, this is the deist equivalent of obeying transcendent commandments handed down by a god. Revelation is useless for gaining understanding or knowledge, because it isn't founded on reason, evidence, observable reality.

So our Declaration of Independence speaks of the "pursuit of happiness."

Government exists to express the will of the people as to the best way to regulate human affairs so as to make this pursuit most fruitful. Again, it is a matter of learning, of experimentation, of trying things and seeing how they work, then changing direction on the basis of new knowledge.

Because there isn't a god-given sense of what is right and wrong, of what produces more or less happiness, it takes effort to learn what works, and what doesn't -- on both a personal and societal level. Discussion, debate, criticism, questioning, these are essential both for individuals (like in our own head) and for associations of people (like cities, states, nations).

Ideally, everyone has an equal capacity and right to take part in the messy, yet valuable, democratic processes of electing people to represent them, and then critiquing their performance. 

The differences between people are small in comparison to what makes us similar. Thus it doesn't make sense to restrict control of government to people of a certain gender, race, education, wealth, or whatever. 

Everyone is capable of using his/her reasoning ability to argue for certain policies and choices. It is the quality of reasoning that matters, not the quality of someone's character, faith, religion, ancestry, or such. This is the "radical" side of the American Revolution that, of course, doesn't seem radical or revolutionary at all to most of us today.

It just did back in the late 1700s, when it was widely assumed that power should reside in royalty, church officials, landed gentry, white people, men, and other subsets of humanity. 

Left to ourselves, following our instincts, we often screw things up.

Thus we need to carefully consider the wisdom of our actions both on an individual and societal level. "I will..." is just as vacuous as "Thou shalt..." unless what follows is backed up by solid evidence, careful reasoning, considered discussion.

The reason why Epicurus and those who followed in his philosophical footsteps advocated moderation in most things isn't because this sort of "Middle Way" reflects a transcendent moral or ethical law. Rather, it is just the way nature operates.

If we eat too much, we feel sick to our stomach. If we drink too much, we get a hangover. If we have sex with every willing attractive person we come across, we complicate our lives. So moderation in food, alcohol, and sexual relations isn't a matter of morality, it is the best way of being happy in the long term.

Similarly, when left to themselves people often over-indulge on a social level. We will be tempted to usurp others' property, possessions, money, and so on. Thus government exists as a necessary social conscience. Again, this requires commitment to a "learning culture," just as individual happiness does.

Since there is no God looking after us, and no moral rules other than the natural consequences of nature's laws, we humans have to feel our way along as best we can. Our guide isn't a transcendent revelation of "This is the way things are." Rather, it is a never-ending search for truth, wisdom, knowledge, reality.

There is no end to this search.

Choices between better and worse ways of acting always will confront us, both as individuals and as members of the body politic. If we have good reasons for doing this rather than that, and learn from the results of our actions, that's the best we can do.

Such was the vision of our country's founders.

Naturally Matthew Stewart expresses this much more clearly and completely in his book than I've been able to do in this blog post. But it was enjoyable to give it a reasoned try.

Neil deGrasse Tyson on religion vs. objective truth

The headline on this Daily Beast piece is a bit misleading: "Neil deGrasse Tyson Defends Scientology -- and the Bush Administration's Science Record." 

Sure, both statements are true. But only in a certain context. Here's some of what astrophysicist Tyson says about Scientology.

So, you have people who are certain that a man in a robe transforms a cracker into the literal body of Jesus saying that what goes on in Scientology is crazy?

...But why aren’t they a religion? What is it that makes them a religion and others are religions? If you attend a Seder, there’s an empty chair sitting right there and the door is unlocked because Elijah might walk in.

OK. These are educated people who do this. Now, some will say it’s ritual, some will say it could literally happen. But religions, if you analyze them, who is to say that one religion is rational and another isn’t? It looks like the older those thoughts have been around, the likelier it is to be declared a religion.

If you’ve been around 1,000 years you’re a religion, and if you’ve been around 100 years, you’re a cult. That’s how people want to divide the kingdom. Religions have edited themselves over the years to fit the times, so I’m not going to sit here and say Scientology is an illegitimate religion and other religions are legitimate religions. They’re all based on belief systems.

Look at Mormonism! There are ideas that are as space-exotic within Mormonism as there are within Scientology, and it’s more accepted because it’s a little older than Scientology is, so are we just more accepting of something that’s older?

Great points. It reminds me of the saying that an atheist is someone who tells believers, "I just deny one more God than you do."

Meaning, every major religion (and maybe also every minor one) teaches that it knows who/what the True God(s) is or are. Beliefs, rituals, and such based on that supposed knowledge make great good sense to the religion's followers, while the practices of other religions are looked upon as misguided, if not bizarre.

Next Sunday countless Christians will worship on Easter, which celebrates the bodily resurrection of Jesus.

That is really a very weird belief. Sure, to Christians it isn't, but that's because they take it to be true. To them the idea that the angel Gabriel verbally revealed the Quran to Muhammed over about 23 years, though... that is clearly absurd. 

Well, in religion one person's ridiculous absurdity is another person's blessed faith. Thus there are lots of different religions, each appealing to different groups of people. Which seemingly is a lot like music -- there are many different genres, classical, rock, hip hop, rap, blues, jazz, etc. etc. -- except it really isn't.

Because few people who like a certain type of music also claim that this type is objectively better than other sorts of music, whereas religions typically make objective truth claims. 

Religions are popular because they make people feel better. So does listening to music. But people don't get into actual music wars, with killing and such. Nor do they try to justify social policies and laws based on their music preferences.

Religious believers do, though. Why?

Because in order to feel good about their religion, most devotees need to believe that its teachings are true, even without any demonstrable evidence for this. After all, how comforting would the notion of heaven be, if it was viewed as a fictional place rather than as an actual afterlife destination?

This objectification of a subjective belief, Tyson points out, causes problems.

Now, where the rubber hits the road is, since we are a free country where belief systems are constitutionally protected—provided they don’t infringe on the rights of others—then how do you have governance over “all” when you have belief systems for the “some”?

It seems to me that the way you govern people is you base governance on things that are objectively true; that are true regardless of your belief system, or no matter what the tenets are of your holy documents. And then they should base it on objective truths that apply to everyone.

So the issue comes about not that there are religious people in the world that have one view over another, it’s if you have one view or another based on faith and you want to legislate that in a way that affects everyone. That’s no longer a free democracy. That’s a country where the few who have a belief system that’s not based in objective reality want to control the behavior of everyone else.

...But the point here is that if you’re religious, and your religion tells you that being gay is bad, then don’t be gay. But you have to remind yourself that that’s your belief system, and there are other belief systems that don’t agree with that, so you should not be in the position to make legislation that affects other people. 

Absolutely. Nicely said, Dr. Tyson.

However, I did have to pause and ponder the statement, "It seems to me that the way you govern people is you base governance on things that are objectively true." At first this seemed far distant from how legislators in this country actually govern, even when they govern well.

But the more I thought about it, it does seem that objective reality is indeed the basis for all legislation and executive action.

Laws and policies are intended to make a difference in the real world. So even though it isn't always obvious how "objectively true" is the touchstone for governing, it does seem to be, deep down.

For example, a few months ago the Oregon legislature considered a bill that would eliminate non-medical reasons for not immunizing children. I thought this was a good idea. Extensive research has show that immunizations are generally safe and effective, bringing many more health benefits than problems.

It shouldn't matter what people believe about immunizations; what counts are the objective facts about immunizations. These can be argued about and debated, but the goal is to learn what is objectively true.

Sure, personal values play a role in political discussions. These should be subservient to generally held facts, though. This was the theme of one of my first Church of the Churchless blog posts, "Religious values have no place in politics."

But I can’t think of any examples of opinions about political issues that are incapable of being founded on either proven or provable factual premises. Consider abortion, stem-cell research, and gay marriage—three issues that are commonly considered to comprise the core of “values-based” voting in the last election. 

Opinions about each of these issues can, and should, be founded on objective facts derived from social science and medical science research. There are costs and benefits to various individuals and society as a whole from the presence or absence of abortion, stem-cell research, and gay marriage. These costs and benefits can be determined. They can be communicated. They can be discussed. They can be the basis for informed political decisions. 

But you can’t determine, communicate, discuss, or decide anything on a religious or what-God-wants basis. The moral tenets of every religion are unproven and unprovable, using Volokh’s words. However, the moral tenets that flow out of political decisions founded on accurate real-world information can be proven, because the real world is provable. 

For example, fetuses either feel pain or they don’t. If they do, then it should be possible to determine how much pain is experienced during an abortion. People could use this information to help decide when an abortion is justified and when it isn’t. Intelligent debates about the pros and cons of abortion could replace the frenzied moralistic “I’m right and you’re wrong!” screeching that now passes for political discourse in this country. 

You can’t debate with someone who doesn’t have a defensible reason for why they believe what they do. You can’t debate with someone who responds to a reasoned argument with “Because the Bible says so” or “Jesus condemns sinners.”

Indiana legalizes religious discrimination. Glad I live in Oregon.

Indiana has passed a Freedom to Discriminate bill. That's the name Matthew Tully, an Indianapolis Star columnist, prefers over the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.

Here's some excerpts from his "Statehouse Republicans embarrass Indiana. Again."

Let's call it what it is. It's discrimination wrapped up in a legislative bow. It's divisiveness painted as something holy. It's tired and cynical politics weakly masked as a principled stand.

Sure, it is cleverly labeled with a market-tested name (the Religious Freedom bill), but please don't be fooled: This is nothing more than a government endorsement of discrimination. Yes, in this land of liberty, our state's government is prepared to push into law a measure allowing one group of people to tell others that they are not equal and not welcome at their businesses.

...Once again, Statehouse Republicans have found a way to divide our state. They've done so with a bill that will allow business owners to judge the morality of their potential customers and to decide whether those customers are worthy of spending their money in their shop, bakery, or whatever.

My goodness, can Indiana Republicans just get past an anger over gays and lesbians that borders on the obsessive? Apparently, they cannot. And, so, after losing their war over same-sex marriage last year, Statehouse Republicans have joined a national conservative effort to create a crisis that doesn't exist. Along the way, they are making clear that yesterday — or, to be more accurate, the last century — still controls today's Grand Old Party. 

Some relatives on my wife's side live in Indiana. Being good-hearted people, naturally they're aghast at what bigoted Republicans in their state have wrought. 

I enjoyed this Facebook post from one of them:

Since our wonderful Indiana state legislature has decided that it is ok to ignore laws if you disagree with them based on religion, I'd like to announce my religious beliefs. My religion forbids me from following posted speed limits signs, as they are an abomination. I am required to drive at whatever speed I feel in my heart is appropriate. 

I'll announce other laws that my religious beliefs exempt me from as I come across them. Thanks.

Naturally I had to leave a comment on the post.

Excellent idea. I recommend making the unlimited use of alcohol and psychoactive drugs part of your religion also. Makes more sense than hating gays does, or whatever other religious craziness Indiana now allows.

I've had similar thoughts about the absurdity of letting people ignore laws in the name of their religion. In "No, Ben Sasse, religious beliefs don't allow someone to ignore laws," I said:

Should people get a free pass to break whatever laws they want under the banner of religion? What prevents someone from forming the Church of Drunk Driving whose holy sacrament is tossing down a six-pack and then jumping in a car?

As already noted, "Religion" is just a name for a collection of unsubstantiated, nonfactual personal beliefs that are held by enough people to give them some sort of social acceptance.

If you hear an outside voice in your head telling you to do something, you'll be considered crazy. Unless you say that the voice is God --then you'll be revered as a religious devotee. 

I don't see why religious beliefs should be treated any differently under the law as any other subjective individual belief. If we start allowing people to ignore laws they don't believe in, there will be no end to the law-breaking.

For me, the only positive aspect about Indiana granting businesses a license to discriminate is that it makes me feel good that I live in Oregon, where we're considerably more enlightened. 

Today I came across an encouraging article, "This is the most godless city in America." Which is... Portland. Yay, Oregon!

If you don’t believe in God, you might want to move to the Pacific Northwest.

Portland, Ore., is No. 1 on the list of metropolitan areas with the most religiously unaffiliated residents (42%), according to the nonpartisan and nonprofit Public Religion Research Institute’s American Values Atlas, a survey of 50,000 people. Seattle and San Francisco were tied at second place (with 33%) on the list, and Denver (32%) and Phoenix (26%) were third and fourth.

Indianapolis, predictably, was 19% religiously unaffiliated. And probably it is more open-minded than rural parts of Indiana. Some of our relatives live near Bloomington, though, which is a pretty cool university town.

Contraception coverage dispute shows absurdity of religious belief

Beliefs are not equal under the law. At least, not in the United States. Religious beliefs have an edge over non-religious beliefs, even when the believer holds the same belief. 

Which is absurd. 

By their nature, beliefs are a matter of opinion. Otherwise we'd call them "facts." Gravity is a fact. God is a belief. 

Favoring insurance coverage for contraceptives (birth control pills and other means of preventing pregnancy) is a belief. It can be founded on facts as well as ethical principles. But in the end, it is a belief.

Most, if not all, governmental social policy decisions in this country come down to a matter of democratically elected public officials choosing one alternative over others -- again, based on beliefs (hopefully factually founded).

The Affordable Care Act mandates that contraception coverage be included in health insurance policies.

There are good reasons for doing this. Preventing unwanted pregnancies is the best way of reducing the number of abortions. Women should be able to choose if they want to become pregnant, rather than leaving this largely to reproductive chance.

Yet the Affordable Care Act carved out an exception for those organizations which have a religious objection to providing contraception coverage for employees. 

This is ridiculous. Again, why should someone with a religious belief be able to ignore a law, while someone who holds the same belief for non-religious reasons has to abide by the law? 

If a woman-hater believed that females should be barefoot, pregnant, and obedient to men, he couldn't use that misogynist belief as a basis for getting out of the Affordable Care Act's contraceptive coverage mandate.

But if a devout Catholic believes that females shouldn't be able to use contraceptives, our political and legal system says "You don't have follow the law like other people do." 

Two beliefs, each at odds with a broad cultural consensus about what constitutes good social policy, yet only one gets to ignore the law. 

I don't think religious believers should be able to get any special treatment under the law. However, since they do, the question at hand is whether requiring an order of Colorado nuns to sign a simple form saying they have a religious objection to contraception coverage puts an undue burden on them.  

Of course not.

Probably The Little Sisters of the Poor doesn't have to file tax returns. If they did, they'd realize that if anything is an undue burden, it is complying with IRS requirements. For a religious organization, getting out of the Affordable Care Act's contraception coverage mandate is super-easy.

"They need only self-certify that they are a non-profit organization that hold themselves out as religious and have religious objections to providing coverage for contraceptive services, and then provide a copy of their self-certification to the third-party administrator of their self-insured group health plan," argued Solicitor General Donald Verrilli Jr. in the government's filing.

But in a reply filed by the Little Sisters lead counsel Mark Rienzi late Friday, the nuns' attorney countered that the government is "simply blind to the religious exercise at issue" and that "minimizing someone's religious beliefs does not make them disappear."

That's right, unfortunately. I wish the absurd relgious beliefs of The Little Sisters of the Poor would disappear, particularly the ones that go against the grain of sound ethical social policy decisions. 

This great Matt Wuerker cartoon shows how crazy it would be if someone's personal beliefs were able to determine what sort of health insurance coverage his or her employees could get.

How religious fundamentalists are like dogmatic Republicans

Tom Tomorrow's "Their Own Reality" comic, which is serious as well as funny, applies equally to religion as to Republicans.

Just exchange some words and examples, and the comic shows how religious fundamentalists lose touch with reality just as political fundamentalists do.

(click image to enlarge)

Religious right got smacked down in U.S. 2012 election

We did it! Faithless, churchless, secular, non-believing Americans are on the political march. So says a fascinating story in the New York Times, "Christian Right Failed to Sway Voters on Issues."

Christian conservatives, for more than two decades a pivotal force in American politics, are grappling with Election Day results that repudiated their influence and suggested that the cultural tide — especially on gay issues — has shifted against them.

They are reeling not only from the loss of the presidency, but from what many of them see as a rejection of their agenda. They lost fights against same-sex marriage in all four states where it was on the ballot, and saw anti-abortion-rights Senate candidates defeated and two states vote to legalize marijuana for recreational use.

(Sadly, in the state where I live, Oregon, a citizen initiative that would have legalized marijuana failed to pass. But happily, Washington state passed marijuana legalization, including its sale in officially sanctioned stores. I'm predicting a tourism boom between Oregon and Washington.)

Back in 2004, after the Bush-Kerry presidential contest, I started this blog because I was so upset with how Christian fundamentalists had swayed the election in Bush's favor. They'd come out in droves to vote for hateful anti-gay marriage ballot measures in many states. 

So it's hugely satisfying to learn that Americans are turning away from that sort of misguided religiosity. Once again, the Christian right put a lot of time, money, and effort into defeating candidates and initiatives that offended their rigid moral sensibilities.

Didn't work this time.

“Millions of American evangelicals are absolutely shocked by not just the presidential election, but by the entire avalanche of results that came in,” R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, in Louisville, Ky., said in an interview. “It’s not that our message — we think abortion is wrong, we think same-sex marriage is wrong — didn’t get out. It did get out.

“It’s that the entire moral landscape has changed,” he said. “An increasingly secularized America understands our positions, and has rejected them.”

I'm proud of voters in Washington state. Along with legalizing marijuana, they defeated an initiative that would have overturned legislative approval of gay marriage. Until this election no state had endorsed gay marriage through a vote of the people. 

But last Tuesday Maine, Maryland, and Washington did so. The times are a'changing, to quote Bob Dylan. It just has taken longer than us flower children types expected back in the '60s. The United States took a moralistic Christian turn for quite a while, which now is reversing according to the NY Times story.

The election results are just one indication of larger trends in American religion that Christian conservatives are still digesting, political analysts say. Americans who have no religious affiliation — pollsters call them the “nones” — are now about one-fifth of the population over all, according to a study released last month by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.

The younger generation is even less religious: about one-third of Americans ages 18 to 22 say they are either atheists, agnostics or nothing in particular. Americans who are secular are far more likely to vote for liberal candidates and for same-sex marriage. Seventy percent of those who said they had no religion voted for Mr. Obama, according to exit polls conducted by Edison Research.

Not surprising. However, what is surprising to me is how so many Republicans are supportive of policies that limit individual freedom.

This is a core contradiction in American conservatism: right-wingers want to keep government out of people's lives, except when it comes to who people can marry, what psychoactive substances they can ingest, whether women can choose to have a baby, and other decisions that libertarians seemingly should support -- but most Republicans don't.

My theory is that conservatives in this country have been infected with religion to a much greater extent than conservatives in other Western nations are. This disease weakens their commitment to individual liberty, because religions want control over people, believing that they alone know what pleases God. 

And it isn't libertarian-style freedom.

So it is the secularists and other open-minded voters who adhere to values that should appeal to small-government Republicans: allowing people to marry whoever they want; to use marijuana if they want; to have an abortion if they want; to have access to insurance coverage for contraceptives if they want.

I've got some advice for the recently soundly-defeated Republican Party. You'd get much more support from a much larger proportion of the electorate if you remained conservative on economic issues, and became more liberal on social issues. 

That's a formula which could work for you, given changing demographics. Relying on your traditional base, older white religious voters, is a recipe for continued electoral defeats. Loosen up on dogmatic morality and tighten up on deficit reduction, tax reform, and similar fiscal stuff.

U.S. election a victory for reality

Reality won tonight! I've been glued to my television, laptop, and iPhone for about six hours, sweating out the results of our national election.

Obama has been re-elected president. Democrats are going to maintain control of the Senate. Virtually every Republican I was hoping would lose, did. 

I'm happy. Both for the political philosophy that I favor, and for the reality based community that I consider myself to be a proud member of.

Because this was more than an election between Republicans and Democrats. Borrowing a fancy term from a highly respected political analyst, Nate Silver, who I like a lot, this was a epistemological watershed. 

So said I in a post yesterday on my other blog.

Knowledge vs. feeling. Facts vs. fantasy. Science vs. religion. 

A watershed is marked by a divide.

The choice between Romney and Obama, along with the choice between Republicans and Democrats generally, indeed involves two ways of how we gain an understanding about reality -- the province of epistemology. 

Nate Silver is a proud member of the knowledge/facts/science community.

So am I. So is Obama, by and large. Romney and most Republicans running for office at the national level are part of the feeling/fantasy/religion community.

Thus when ballots are counted tomorrow, voters not only will be electing candidates, they'll be choosing a worldview that will be a basis for guiding our country during the next four years. Or longer.

...I very much want Obama to win tomorrow. I also want Silver's epistemological perspective as shared on Five Thirty Eight to win. Which it will, if Obama gets an electoral college win close to the 315 (O) - 223 (R) split Silver is projecting. 

That would be a giant Obama victory. And also a victory for the reality-based community.

Currently Obama has 285 electoral votes, according to the New York Times. If he wins Florida and Ohio, as seems likely, that'll add 47 to his total, making it at least 332. Pretty damn close to what Nate Silver predicted.

That's the power of reality, fueled by facts, evidence, reason, respect for truth. It's what science has, and religion lacks. 

Silver has written a book called "The Signal and the Noise."

With great timing, it arrived in the mail today from Amazon. I like the title. Distinguishing between truth/the signal and falsity/the noise is central to both political polling analysis and understanding of what the cosmos is all about.

Religiosity pays a lot of attention to noise, intermittent unreliable static that doesn't reflect solid reality. Examples: supposed miracles, divine visions, and other subjective experiences reported by individuals yet unconfirmed as part of objective truth.

It's easy to miss reality's signal when our focus is on meaningless noise. Today voters in the United States rejected falsities offered up by Republican candidates. That's a win for reality. I hope this is a sign that the noise of religion will be similarly rejected by increasing numbers of Americans.

When is it OK to trash-talk a religion?

The recent killing of diplomats at the American consulate in Libya raises questions about the balance between freedom of speech and religious liberty.

This subject is dear to my heart, since I've been blogging on this here Church of the Churchless for eight years, attempting to do the same thing -- speak my mind about the ridiculousness of organized religiosity while respecting the personal beliefs of individuals (after all, we all believe in weird things; weird, that is, from the perspective of other people; to us, we're absolutely normal).

It's unclear what set off Muslims who attacked American diplomatic outposts in Libya and Egypt.

Part of the impetus clearly was an anti-Islam video put up on You Tube that trash-talks Muhammad. It's so infantile and poorly made, I'm not going to embed a viewer in this post like I usually do with You Tube videos. I managed to watch about five minutes before I got sick of the video and turned it off.

Before crowds attacked the embassy and consulate, but after rumblings of discontent had been heard in the "Arab street," the American embassy in Cairo issued a statement that got Mitt Romney in an unjustified uproar.

PolitiFact demonstrated that this wasn't an apology for the video, as Romney claimed. (How can someone apologize for something they had nothing to do with?) Still, Romney felt that it excused Islamic extremism and denigrated free speech. Here's what the embassy said.

The Embassy of the United States in Cairo condemns the continuing efforts by misguided individuals to hurt the religious feelings of Muslims – as we condemn efforts to offend believers of all religions. Today, the 11th anniversary of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States, Americans are honoring our patriots and those who serve our nation as the fitting response to the enemies of democracy. Respect for religious beliefs is a cornerstone of American democracy. We firmly reject the actions by those who abuse the universal right of free speech to hurt the religious beliefs of others.

Snap judgments aren't helpful here. There are some subtle distinctions to be thought about carefully in this statement. My first reaction was to disagree with the notion that the video was an unjustified abuse of free speech. If Muslims can't take criticism of their religion, that's their problem. Grow thicker skin.

But in the Romney campaign's talking points regarding whether it was appropriate for the embassy to condemn the You Tube video/movie, the response was "Governor Romney rejects the reported message of the movie. There is no room for religious hatred or intolerance."

I agree with this (one of the few times I've agreed with anything Romney says). 

To me, Islam is an absurd religion. But so is every religion. None of them are worthy of being believed as objective fact, because there's no demonstrable evidence to support the tenets of any religious faith. Yet (and this is an important yet), most people on Earth believe in an unbelievable religion.

So what is a non-believer like me to do? Spend all of my time going up to the vast majority of my fellow humans and scream at them, "You're an idiot! You believe ridiculous religous crap!"? No, that doesn't feel like a good thing to do. 

One reason is that I used to be one of those idiots myself. Another is that insulting people rarely makes them change their mind in the direction the insulter desires. Still another is self-interest: belligerently getting in someone's face can lead to your own being punched (figuratively or literally).

I heard this on a radio talk show yesterday: "Sure, you've got the right to tell your neighbor that his wife is dumb, fat, and ugly. But he's also got a right to sock you in the nose." Today our nation's top military leader recognized the same truth.

Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey called Florida pastor Terry Jones on Wednesday to ask him to withdraw his support for the video that some reports have linked with anti-American unrest in the Muslim world, a spokesman said.

“He called of his own initiative over concern that the violence incited by the film would pose risks to U.S. service members around the world,” said Marine Col. Dave Lapan.

The bottom line for me is this: I'm fine with people criticizing religious beliefs. However, I don't like it when these criticisms are hateful, overly emotional, insulting, denigrating, and aimed at hurting the feelings of believers.

Though I dislike organized religions, I've got no problem with individual religious beliefs.

Like I said before, we all believe things that are deeply personal, can't be proven as objective fact, and offer us comfort in this often-uncomfortable world. Life is tough. We all need someone or something to lean on.

This seems to be what the statement of the Egyptian embassy and Romney's campaign have in common. Me included, I guess. We respect the diversity of religious, spiritual, mystical, and philosophical beliefs in this country, and the world as a whole. We don't like it when haters venomously attack some belief system in a hateful manner, rather than reasonably.

"I don't agree with the premises of your religion" is a lot different than "You're a fool for believing what you do." Personal professions of faith shouldn't be attacked; collective claims that such-and-such is objectively true for everybody deserve rigorous critical debate.

I'd enjoy watching a You Tube video that dismantled in a reasonable fashion the tenets of Islam. But in my five minutes of watching I couldn't discern any coherent criticisms of Islam in the video that got some Muslims so righteously angry. 

Of course, they might have gotten angry at reasonable criticisms also.

If so, my one-word response would be tough. Deal with it. On the whole, Muslims seem to be overly touchy about people criticizing their religion. There's no excuse for trashing the American consulate and killing four diplomats. 

At the same time, I don't like trash-talking of personal religious beliefs either. Here on the Church of the Churchless I often say, "Whatever works for you, go for it. Just don't expect me, or anyone else, to agree with you."

Romney's religion isn't an asset. No religion is.

Nice people are just that: nice. Good people are just that: good. Compassionate people are just that: compassionate. 

There's no need to ascribe their niceness, goodness, or compassion to their religiosity, as Jack Roberts did in an opinion piece, "Romney's religion should be an asset, not a liability," in today's Portland Oregonian. 

I say this as a non-Mormon who from my Mormon friends has gained a deep appreciation for the positive values that church imparts to its members -- chief among them their obligation to provide support and charity for others. I could never join that church myself because their beliefs are not my beliefs, but I am convinced that every community benefits by having more people with the personal qualities most of the Mormons I know exhibit. 

Well, it's nice to know that the Mormons Jack Roberts is familiar with are nice, good, compassionate people. But if you read some of the comments on the Oregonian article, it'll be clear (and utterly non-surprising) that some Mormons are jerks.

Most of my friends and acquaintances are either atheists or non-Christians. They have lots of positive qualities. I can pretty much guarantee that they're as nice, good, and compassionate as any bunch of religious people.

But I would never claim that their non-belief in God is what makes them so kind and caring. It's irrelevant, really, just as Romney's religion should be when voters assess his qualifications to be president. 

Roberts quotes from a South Park episode dealing with Mormonism. This is to his credit; thumbs-up to any opinion writer who is able to support his position with a South Park quote. However, I learned from a commenter on his piece that Roberts left out the end of what a Mormon boy said in the South Park episode.

Through the magic of Google, I was able to find the script of that show. Here's what the Mormon boy says, in full (I've italicized the part Roberts left out, for understandable editorial reasons).

Look, maybe us Mormons do believe in crazy stories that make absolutely no sense, and maybe Joseph Smith did make it all up, but I have a great life. and a great family, and I have the Book of Mormon to thank for that. The truth is, I don't care if Joseph Smith made it all up, because what the church teaches now is loving your family, being nice and helping people. And even though people in this town might think that's stupid, I still choose to believe in it. All I ever did was try to be your friend, Stan, but you're so high and mighty you couldn't look past my religion and just be my friend back. You've got a lot of growing up to do, buddy. Suck my balls.

"Suck my balls" humanizes Gary, the Mormon boy. I found his mini-speech annoyingly sanctimonious up to that point. Those three words revealed him to be an appealingly flawed human, just like the rest of us. 

Still, it's absurd to think that just because the Mormon church encourages its members to love their family, be nice, and help people, this is why Mormons do these things. Non-Mormons do those things also. Non-religious people do those things also.

All kinds of people all over the world love their family, are nice, and help people. Jack Roberts needs to realize this. By and large religion doesn't make people better, any more than playing golf, going to college, playing a musical instrument, or doing anything else makes people better. 

Everything we experience in life, along with our genetic heritage, makes us who we are. Religion is one influence, but by no means the most important influence. Get to know all those nice, caring, compassionate atheists in your community, and you'll understand what I mean.

Goddamn it -- "God" is back in Democratic Party platform

Jeez, I was beginning to think that the Democratic Party to which I belong really was a coven of atheistic religion-haters who got their kicks from burning the Bible while high on illicit drugs (that'd be a good thing, of course).

My hopefulness arose from reading that "God" had been dropped from the 2012 Democratic platform. The Christian Broadcast Network reported:

Guess what? God’s name has been removed from the Democratic National Committee platform. This is the paragraph that was in the 2008 platform:

“We need a government that stands up for the hopes, values, and interests of working people, and gives everyone willing to work hard the chance to make the most of their God-given potential.”

Now the words “God-given” have been removed. The paragraph has been restructured to say this:

“We gather to reclaim the basic bargain that built the largest middle class and the most prosperous nation on Earth – the simple principle that in America, hard work should pay off, responsibility should be rewarded, and each one of us should be able to go as far as our talent and drive take us.”

I much prefer the godless paragraph. It sounds much more American to me. Hard work. Responsibility. Talent. Drive. Those words seem more in tune with our national ethos than "God-given potential."

God-given potential? Sounds like whatever we're born with, that's what we're stuck with, because God gave us what we have to work with, and nobody can argue with God. 

But the Democrats acceded to a request by President Obama to restore "God" to the platform.

Well, I watched video of the voice vote at the convention which needed a 2/3 majority to be approved, and it sure sounded to me like an equal number of delegates approved and disaprroved of God in the platform (plus Jerusalem being the capital of Israel).

Maybe in 2016 the Dems will hold firm on their godlessness. I'll start praying for that!

Linking religious faith and Romney's tax returns

Ever since I started following the controversy over Harry Reid's claim that Mitt Romney didn't pay any taxes for ten years, I've had a feeling that deep philosophical issues relating to the validity of religious faith are involved.

Here's my attempt to explain why. 

It's fascinating, really. Reid and Romney are both Mormons, which is a weird variety of Christianity. Or to some, Mormonism is an independently weird religion.

Regardless, Christians and Mormons believe in the Bible. The New Testament gospels were written by guys -- Matthew, Mark, Luke, John -- with no direct knowledge of Jesus. So what they said about Jesus' life and teachings is hearsay.

Just like Reid's claim about Romney failing to pay federal income taxes for a decade. He won't reveal his source. Attention is being focused on moderate Republican Jon Huntsman (a fellow Mormon and Reid supporter).

So Reid got information from somebody who supposedly knows what's in the tax returns.

Thus Reid's knowledge has pretty much the same ontological validity as the Gospels. Anonymous sources reported they know Jesus died on the cross and was resurrected. Likewise, an anonymous source reports he/she knows Romney's tax returns show no income tax paid for ten years.

Why, then, does PolitiFact give Reid's claim a Pants on Fire rating?

To be consistent, shouldn't PolitiFact give every Christian politician who refers to Jesus and the New Testament a Pants on Fire rating? If faith in anonymous sources is an admirable trait in religious believers, what's wrong with Harry Reid having faith in whoever told him about Romney's tax returns?

There's no independent demonstrable evidence that Jesus is the Son of God, other than what is written in the Gospels by people who claimed to know other people with direct knowledge of Jesus. There's also no independent demonstrable evidence that Romney failed to pay income taxes for ten years, other than Reid's statement that he talked with someone with direct knowledge of Romney's tax returns.

PolitiFact shouldn't give a Pants on Fire rating, which amounts to "you lie!", when there isn't any demonstable evidence on either side of a claim. Reid says Romney didn't pay any taxes. Romney says he did. 

Why should either Reid or Romney be believed without evidence? What basis is there for calling Reid a liar, and not Romney? Neither has brought forward any firm facts to back up their claims. 

Ah, you might be thinking, but Romney does know what is in his tax returns, because he filed them.

Yes, that's true. But this is analogous to someone knowing what happened in Jesus' last days. Why should what they say be believed without confirming evidence? There are good reasons for them to make up stories about Jesus' resurrection and other miracles. 

The big difference between Christianity's truth claims and Reid/Romney's truth claims is that evidence does exist for the latter: Romney's tax returns. Romney has said he doesn't want to release any more returns because the Obama campaign would use information in them against him.

Which is more reason to be as skeptical about Romney's "I did pay taxes" as Reid's "He didn't pay taxes." Without demonstrable evidence, both statements have to be accepted on faith, just like religious claims are.

This morning I saw that PolitiFact had put out a Twitter Tweet on this subject:

We're hearing suggestions to create a new Truth-O-Meter rating for something like "unsubstantiated." Let us know what you think.

l think it's an excellent idea.

At the moment neither Reid nor Romney can substantiate their claims about Romney's tax returns. So it's a draw.

Both should get an "unsubstantiated" on the issue of whether Romney paid income taxes for ten years. It's unfair to give Reid a Pants on Fire for saying he heard that he didn't, when all Romney has done is say that he did.

I'd also like to see PolitiFact rate faith-based statements by politicians which bear on social policy. For example, if a politician says that an embryo or fetus has a soul, assess the evidence for this. Is that statement true or false?

Most likely, it would be unsubstantiated.

Usually religious claims rest on supernatural assumptions which can neither be proven, nor definitively rejected. The probability is just very high that those claims are false, based on the lack of evidence which seemingly should be evident but isn't (like miracles, which somehow stopped happening with the advent of scientific ways of studying them).

Personally, what I find most probable about Romney's tax returns is that he did pay income taxes most years, but at an embarassingly low rate.

For that reason -- and others like Swiss bank accounts, IRA gimmicks, high-priced dressage horse expenses, and such -- Romney doesn't want the truth about his finances to come out. Similarly, if religious believers knew everything that goes on behind the scenes of their favorite faith, my bet is that the truth also would shock them.

Mitt Romney, you're wrong: this isn't a Christian nation

There are lots of reasons for people in the United States to vote for President Obama rather than Mitt Romney in November. Romney's sucking up to evangelical Christians is just one reason -- but an important one.

In a recent speech at a hotbed of Christian'ist fundamentalism, Liberty University, Romney told the assembled believers in an imaginary God the untruths they wanted to hear.

In the same week that President Obama galvanized his base by endorsing same-sex marriage, Mr. Romney’s message was that evangelicals could count on him to operate as president under “a common worldview,” including his position that marriage should be between only a man and a woman.

...Repeatedly invoking God and citing an array of Christian leaders and thinkers, from Pope John Paul II to the novelist C. S. Lewis, Mr. Romney spoke of the centrality of family and service and the tradition from America’s beginnings of trusting “in God, not man.”

Only problem, and it's a big one, is that this country never has been a Christian nation. Our founding fathers (and mothers, I assume) were appropriately skeptical of the sort of dogmatism that Romney mistakenly considers to be part of this nation's early history.

Check out the quotes in "The 12 Best Reasons Why The U.S. Is Not Now, and Never Should Be, a Christian Nation." Here's a couple of my favorites:

3) “But how has it happened that millions of fables, tales, legends, have been blended with both Jewish and Christian revelation that have made them the most bloody religion that ever existed.”–John Adams, letter to F.A. Van der Kamp, Dec. 27, 1816

6) “History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government. This marks the lowest grade of ignorance, of which their political as well as religious leaders will always avail themselves for their own purpose.” –Thomas Jefferson to Baron von Humboldt, 1813

7) “Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise.” –James Madison, letter to William Bradford, April 1, 1774

10) “During almost fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What has been its fruits? More or less, in all places, pride and indolence in the clergy; ignorance and servility in the laity; in both, superstition, bigotry and persecution.” –James Madison, A Memorial and Remonstrance

Sam Harris' great little book, "Letter to a Christian Nation," offers up a blunt modern perspective about why Romney is so wrong.

There is, in fact, no worldview more reprehensible in its arrogance than that of a religious believer: the creator of the universe takes an interest in me, approves of me, loves me, and will reward me after death; my current beliefs, drawn from scripture, will remain the best statement of the truth until the end of the world; everyone who disagrees with me will spend eternity in hell.

…An average Christian, in an average church, listening to an average Sunday sermon has achieved a level of arrogance simply unimaginable in scientific discourse—and there have been some extraordinarily arrogant scientists.

Republicans want to establish a U.S. theocracy

I used to joke about the "American Taliban" -- fundamentalist Christians who say they want to make this country into a Bible-based theocracy.

But now that every Republican presidential candidate has endorsed this crazy notion in one form or another, it isn't nearly as funny to me. Losing our constitutionally-guaranteed right of freedom from religion is a serious matter.

And one worth fighting hard to prevent. 

I've voted for Republicans in the past, and would consider doing so again if moderates of the sort we Oregonians used to elect came back into G.O.P. fashion. But nowadays Governor Tom McCall, Senator Bob Packwood, and Senator Mark Hatfield wouldn't have a chance in a Republican primary.

It's disturbing that Rick Santorum, who either has a national lead in the Republican presidential race or is close to Romney's polling percentage, has said that the United States should follow God's law, not secular laws. 

Unlike Islam, where the higher law and the civil law are the same, in our case, we have civil laws. But our civil laws have to comport with the higher law. … As long as abortion is legal—at least according to the Supreme Court—legal in this country, we will never have rest, because that law does not comport with God’s law.

Santorum also has criticized President Obama for not aligning his policies with Christian theology. Hey, Rick, wake up! The President of the United States isn't supposed to do this, according to our constitution. 

You and your fellow Republican theocrats are the ones who should be roundly chastized for ignoring our nation's history. 

Columnist Joe Nocera notes that early on, Roger Williams and other like-minded believers fleeing from religious persecution wanted to insure that immigrants to America would be free to either believe in God, or not believe. 

However, John Winthrop was the Rick Santorum of his day. He wanted America to be a theocentric state founded on strict Puritanism. Fortunately, the Williams ideal prevailed. Unfortunately, the 2012 Republican presidential candidates show strong signs of wanting to resurrect Winthrop's dream of an authoritarian Christian nation.

Nocera concludes with:

I don’t doubt that if Winthrop could see America today, he would be horrified — just as, in many ways, Santorum is. Americans are free to do things that Santorum — and Winthrop — would view as deeply sinful. Individuals can believe what they want and act as they wish, without caring about what Rick Santorum — or John Winthrop — thinks.

By the time Roger Williams was an old man, Quakers had largely taken over the political structure of Rhode Island. “Roger Williams despised the Quaker religion,” Barry writes. But he did nothing to prevent their ascent, because he believed so strongly that one’s religious beliefs should not matter in the affairs of state.

Unlike Winthrop, if Williams could see the America his central idea gave us, he would likely be pleased. We should all be.

Republicans want laws to be optional. Drink & drive!

Until I read Rich Lowry's column in the Oregonian today, I didn't realize how wacko the religiousy libertarian wing of the Republican Party had become. 

Way wacko. 

Following Lowry's logic about why Catholics with a moral distaste for contraception shouldn't have to comply with health insurance laws that apply to everybody else, apparently anybody with a moral objection to any law should be able to ignore it.

About a month ago, people who thought religious institutions shouldn’t be forced to pay for things they morally oppose were unremarkable, boring even. Now, they are waging a heinous War on Women.

Through the twisted logic of statism run amok, opposition to a new Health and Human Services mandate forcing employers to buy insurance covering contraceptives becomes opposition to access to contraceptives altogether.

...The Catholic bishops are merely fighting to keep institutions affiliated with their church from getting coerced into participating in what they consider a moral wrong.

Morality comes in many forms. Religious believers have a moral code. So do secular nonbelievers. Thus I assume Lowry wants government to stop coercing anyone "into participating in what they consider to be a moral wrong."

OK. Let's see how that'll work out. 

Surely there are lots of alcoholics who love to both drink and drive. They don't feel like they're doing anything wrong. Their moral code says "Have a good time at a bar. Then get in your car. No problem." Why should drunk drivers not be able to do whatever they want, free of government interference, just like he wants to allow Catholics?

Here's a less extreme example: people who have a moral objection to financing unnecessary wars. Or even wars in general. Lowry seemingly wants every citizen who objects to the Department of Defense to subtract from their tax bill the percentage of the federal budget that goes to the military.

After all, nobody should have to participate in what they feel is a moral wrong. And no reasons need be given for a moral stand. Religions don't have demonstrable, factual, reasonable reasons for their "thou shalt's." 

Blind faith and I believe suffice for religions. So why not for everybody else? 

If you think it'd be ridiculously unworkable if people could decide what laws they wanted to comply with (I sure do), then the absurdity of allowing religious organizations to be exempt from the Affordable Care Act's health insurance coverage rules should be apparent.

But if Lowry and the Republicans get their way, I'll be founding my Church of Unlimited Speeding, Alcohol Consumption, and Pacificism.  

Our sacred sacrament will be racing around superfast on the highways, drunk on whatever type of alcoholic beverage members of the congregation prefer, which has been paid for by all the money saved by deducting from our taxes the 20% or so of the federal budget that goes to defense and security.

Birth control is sinful? That's religious craziness.

A week after I wrote "Contraception should be covered by religious organizations," I'm still amazed that providing birth control benefits to women via a health insurance plan is controversial in the second decade of the twenty-first century.

This isn't the Dark Ages. The Catholic Church doesn't run the western world. Few people, and certainly not the United States Constitution, believe the Pope is infallible when he makes moral pronouncements. 

So why should the Obama administration, or anyone else, take seriously the freak-out of religious fundamentalists over its decision to require faith-based organizations which employ members of the general public to cover a standard set of preventive services, including contraception, in their health insurance plans?

This already is required by 28 states. Lots of Catholic institutions already pay for birth control. Ninety-eight percent of Catholic women have used birth control, while only 2% use the ineffective rhythm method. 

Contraceptive use by Catholics and Evangelicals—including those who attend religious services most frequently—is the norm, according to a new Guttmacher report. This finding confirms that policies making contraceptives more affordable and easier to use reflect the needs and desires of the vast majority of U.S. women and their partners, regardless of their religious beliefs.

“In real-life America, contraceptive use and strong religious beliefs are highly compatible,” says Rachel K. Jones, the report’s lead author. “Most sexually active women who do not want to become pregnant practice contraception, and most use highly effective methods like sterilization, the pill, or the IUD. This is true for Evangelicals and Mainline Protestants, and it is true for Catholics, despite the Catholic hierarchy’s strenuous opposition to contraception.”

It's an absurd controversy. The only reason it's being taken at all seriously is because a bunch of crazies have grouped together under a religious banner, which supposedly makes their craziness more credible.

Actually, it doesn't.

Being out of touch with reality is crazy whether one person or a million are doing it. There's nothing wrong with using birth control. In fact, there's a lot right with contraception. The Institute of Medicine has recommended that it be included among the preventive services available to women in the Affordable Care Act without deductibles or co-payments. 

I don't know anyone who thinks using birth control is wrong. I bet even most religious people don't know anyone who thinks contraception is sinful. But the Pope does. As do the (male) leaders of the Catholic church.

Who cares? I sure don't.

People believe all kinds of weird things. Some religious crazies don't believe in blood transfusions. Others don't believe in using any sort of medical care. If I'm employed by an organization that serves the general public and gets government support, why should I be controlled by religious craziness that I don't believe in?

Gail Collins gets it right in her New York Times opinion piece.

This new rule on contraceptive coverage is part of the health care reform law, which was designed to finally turn the United States into a country where everyone has basic health coverage. In a sane world, the government would be running the whole health care plan, the employers would be off the hook entirely and we would not be having this fight at all. But members of Congress — including many of the very same people who are howling and rending their garments over the bishops’ plight — deemed the current patchwork system untouchable.

The churches themselves don’t have to provide contraceptive coverage. Neither do organizations that are closely tied to a religion’s doctrinal mission. We are talking about places like hospitals and universities that rely heavily on government money and hire people from outside the faith.

We are arguing about whether women who do not agree with the church position, or who are often not even Catholic, should be denied health care coverage that everyone else gets because their employer has a religious objection to it. If so, what happens if an employer belongs to a religion that forbids certain types of blood transfusions? Or disapproves of any medical intervention to interfere with the working of God on the human body?

Organized religion thrives in this country, so the system we’ve worked out seems to be serving it pretty well. Religions don’t get to force their particular dogma on the larger public. The government, in return, protects the right of every religion to make its case heard.

Contraception should be covered by religious organizations

Bizarre. Mystifying. Irrational. That's what religion is.

And that's also how I look upon the freak-out that erupted after the Obama administration required religious organizations (colleges, hospitals, etc.) which serve the general public to cover contraception, just like others who offer health insurance are required to do.

Note: contraception. Not abortion. Birth control pills, condoms, IUD's. The Institute of Medicine recommended that birth control be fully covered under health plans. 

But, you know, the Institute of Medicine used facts, evidence, research, and common sense in reaching that conclusion, which weirds out faith-based folks. Preventing unwanted pregnancies saves lives, reduces abortions, and enables women to space out births, among other benefits (some medical conditions also are treated with birth control pills).

Yet a Catholic archbishop looks upon birth control this way: 

During his lecture, Archbishop Dolan criticized people who postponed conception with “chemicals and latex,” calling them part of the “culture of death.”

Archbishop Dolan, you need to get out of the Dark Ages. Step into the light. And bring your 100% male Catholic leadership along with you. I have zero sympathy for religious crazies who fuss about being required to comply with laws that everyone else has to follow.

Well, make that almost zero.

Conscientious objectors to war, like Quakers, being able to perform some other service than fighting -- that makes sense to me. I'm also OK with doctors who are morally opposed to abortion not being required to perform that procedure.

But a religious institution offering birth control to employees and students of many different faiths who are covered by a health insurance plan is completely different. Nobody is being forced to use contraceptives who doesn't want to. Birth control simply is available at little or no cost to those who want to avail themselves of it.

A "religious conscience exemption" argument usually is a load of crap. Religious believers shouldn't be able to avoid laws just because they have a strongly held personal belief. Hey! We all have strongly held personal beliefs.

I haven't had a single bite of meat or fish since I became a vegetarian in 1970, forty-one years ago. I strongly believe in both the morality of not killing animals for food, and in the health benefits of vegetarianism.

But if a bunch of other vegetarians and me started a college which espoused our dietary beliefs, yet enrolled meat-eaters also, would it be fair if we required that anyone who got a student loan from the federal government couldn't buy a hamburger -- or any other animal flesh -- while they were associated with our college?

Most people would think that'd be ridiculous. But it's no more ridiculous than a Catholic hospital saying "We shouldn't have to provide our employees with birth control coverage under their health insurance plan."

Kevin Drum gets it right: "If You Take Taxpayer Money, You Have to Follow Taxpayer Rules."

I guess I'm tired of religious groups operating secular enterprises (hospitals, schools), hiring people of multiple faiths, serving the general public, taking taxpayer dollars — and then claiming that deeply held religious beliefs should exempt them from public policy. Contra Dionne, it's precisely religious pluralism that makes this impractical.

There are simply too many religions with too many religious beliefs to make this a reasonable approach. If we'd been talking about, say, an Islamic hospital insisting that its employees bind themselves to sharia law, I imagine the "religious community" in the United States would be a wee bit more understanding if the Obama administration refused to condone the practice.

How science supports left-wing politics

Do people have free will? No. 
Is almost everything in the cosmos determined? Yes. 
Have humans evolved a core morality? Yes. 

Put these facts together, and you arrive at a persuasive scientific argument for favoring progressive politics. Read all about it in a post I wrote for my other blog, "Science supports a progressive political agenda."

One more fact:

Will lots of people disagree with this conclusion? Yes.

Sodomites and infidels should govern U.S.

This video response to Rick Perry's religious homophobia is much more to my liking. Hey, the guy makes a lot of sense.

He observes that gay and atheist presidents didn't get us into wars or financial crises. No, "It took some God-fearing vagina penetrators to pull that off." The solution: "Leave the governing to sodomites and infidels."

Sounds good to me. 

 

Rick Perry hates gays and loves religion. Me, the opposite.

Thank you, Rick Perry.

Your homophobic video, where you bizarrely speak of Obama's "war on religion" (huh?), has inspired me to carry on with my own genuine war against hateful religious dogma such as you espouse. 

Take 30 seconds to watch it. Then, if you're as disgusted as I expect you'll be, head to You Tube and click on the thumbs-down (dislike) icon.

So far about 87,000 people dislike the video and 2,000 like it. Good to know Rick Perry doesn't represent Americans. Just the mean-spirited ones.

 

Why are "Islamists" more worrisome than "Christianists"?

I don't understand why there's so much concern about "Islamists" being voted into power in Egypt. Fundamentalist Christians do their best to dominate politics in the United States. So do fundamentalist Jews in Israel.

Why isn't there an equally fervent outcry about "Christianists" or "Judaists" taking over? Well, there is. Andrew Sullivan wrote a good piece about this back in 2006.

So let me suggest that we take back the word Christian while giving the religious right a new adjective: Christianist. Christianity, in this view, is simply a faith. Christianism is an ideology, politics, an ism. The distinction between Christian and Christianist echoes the distinction we make between Muslim and Islamist. Muslims are those who follow Islam.

Islamists are those who want to wield Islam as a political force and conflate state and mosque. Not all Islamists are violent. Only a tiny few are terrorists. And I should underline that the term Christianist is in no way designed to label people on the religious right as favoring any violence at all.

I mean merely by the term Christianist the view that religious faith is so important that it must also have a precise political agenda. It is the belief that religion dictates politics and that politics should dictate the laws for everyone, Christian and non-Christian alike.

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1191826,00.html#ixzz1f7ricOmO

Voters need to quiz candidates about religion

I liked this column by E.J. Dionne a lot. "Election 2012's Great Religious Divide" makes some excellent points about how religion and politics intersect here in the United States.

Yes, everyone is part of a religious minority. Especially atheists and agnostics, since the vast majority of Americans are believers in some faith.

In the United States, we have no religious tests for office. It’s true that this constitutional provision does not prevent a voter from casting a ballot on any basis he or she wishes to use. Nonetheless, it’s the right assumption for citizens in a pluralistic democracy.

All Americans ought to empathize with religious minorities because each of us is part of one. If Mormonism can be held against Romney and Huntsman, then everyone else’s tradition — and, for nonbelievers, their lack of religious affiliation — can be held against them, too. We have gone down this road before. Recall the ugly controversy over Catholicism when Al Smith and John F. Kennedy sought the presidency. We shouldn’t want to repeat the experiences of 1928 or 1960.

But this doesn't mean religion should be off-limits when questioning a candidate about his/her qualifications for office.

As Dionne says, candidates can't brag about how important faith is to them, yet resist queries about how that faith would influence their decision-making.

Religious people cannot have it both ways: to assert that their faith really matters to their public engagement, and then to insist, when it’s convenient, that religion is a matter about which no one has a right to ask questions. Voters especially have a right to know how a candidate’s philosophical leanings shape his or her attitudes toward the religious freedom of unbelievers as well as believers.

And here’s the hardest part: We all have to ask ourselves whether what we claim to be hearing as the voice of faith (or of God) may in fact be nothing more than the voice of our ideology or political party. We should also ask whether candidates are merely exploiting religion to rally some part of the electorate to their side. The difficulty of answering both questions — given the human genius for rationalization — might encourage a certain humility that comes hard to most of us, and perhaps, above all, to people who write opinion columns.

Here's a good example of how religion intrudes upon seemingly purely secular issues.

Who knew that the Affordable Care Act (a.k.a. "Obamacare") interfered with a religious person's ability to rely on God? Fortunately, a U.S. Appeals Court thought otherwise in upholding the Affordable Care Act's constitutionality.

The U.S. Appeals Court for the District of Columbia has upheld a lower court’s ruling in a 2-to-1 vote that the “individual mandate” is constitutional, reports the Associated Press.

The original suit was brought by the American Center for Law and Justice – a legal group created by evangelist Pat Robertson. It claims the individual mandate – which requires everyone to buy health insurance or else face a penalty – violates the religious freedom of those who choose to rely on God to protect them.

Conspiracy theories are faith-based, like religion

Today George, a regular visitor to this blog, left a comment on a post which said, in part: "one thing i would like to know is how come all you guys are besotted with conspiracy theories and the occult?"

That got me to thinking again about why conspiracy theories are so attractive, even to people who decry religious beliefs that aren't evidence-based. A few months ago I wrote a post called "Conspiracy theories -- another form of blind faith."

No need to repeat why I said there. But who needs a need to do something? Here's how the post started out:

One person believes that Jesus was resurrected after dying on the cross. Another person believes that the Bush administration was behind the 9/11 attacks.

Each belief lacks a foundation of demonstrable evidence. Each belief almost certainly is untrue. Each belief has many adherents who vehemently hold to it, despite how bizarre their blind faith is.

I'm a religious skeptic. I'm also a conspiracy theory skeptic. What seems strange to me is how people who decry fundamentalist religion often cling to fundamentalist conspiracy theories.

Now, it's absolutely true that what currently seems to be true, may not be. So I'm not against wild, crazy, blue sky notions that turn consensal reality upside down. Or at least, would, if they were more than just notions. 

Einstein often is used as an example of a solitary individual who looked at the world in a markedly different way and ended up overturning generally held beliefs that seemed to be solidly proven. Yes, he did. But here's the big difference between Einstein and conspiracy theorists:

Einstein backed up his theories with solid evidence that could be confirmed by other experts. After some initial scepticism, It didn't take long for the physics community to embrace the theory of relativity. 

Why? Because it was true.

But when someone claims that a shadowy group of Jewish financiers (or whoever) are out to control the world economy and create a New World Order, this is a remarkable claim that deserves equally remarkable evidence to back it up.

Which, of course, doesn't exist outside of the minds of conspiracy theorists who believe that only they have been able to connect the dots and reveal a perspective on reality everyone else has missed --including professional historians, economists, and political scientists who devote their lives to understanding what is happening in their corner of the knowledge world, yet somehow are blind to truths that conspiracy theorists easily recognize.

Religious faith operates in the same fashion. The human drive to make sense of the world is powerful and innate. When things don't make sense, our brains love to conjure up stories that neatly organizes reality into something comprehensible.

Problem is, imagination isn't truth. Absent evidence, neither religious dogmas nor conspiracy theories should be looked upon as anything more than fantasies. Or more charitably, as hypotheses without factual support. 

Should a presidential candidate's faith matter?

I've argued before that religious beliefs have no place in politics. (See here, here, and here.) This isn't the same as saying that religious people can't be politically active. Heck, if that were the case the vast majority of American citizens would be apolitical.

I just feel that when it comes to policy-making, elected officials should offer up good reasons for why they want to do X rather than Y. Then those who disagree with that choice can engage in a rational debate rather than being met with a faith-based "just because."

Pastor Robert Jeffress has a different point of view.

And even though I find most of his arguments in "Why a candidate's faith matters" unconvincing, I have to give Jeffress credit for being a straightforward, honest, engaging advocate for his Christian religion. (Jeffress has taken heat for calling Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney's Mormon faith a "cult," which of course it is -- along with every other religion, including mainstream Christianity).

On a recent episode of his HBO "Real Time" program, Bill Maher interviewed Jeffress. I found the pastor eminently likable, even as my churchless psyche found his fundamentalist attitudes decidedly unappealing.

In a column that was published in the Washington Post, Jeffress said:

Interestingly, John Jay, the first chief justice of the Supreme Court and co-author of the Federalist Papers, thought a candidate’s religious beliefs should be a primary consideration in voting. Jay wrote, “It is the duty, as well as the privilege and interest of our Christian nation, to select and prefer Christians for their rulers.” According to Jay, preferring a Christian candidate is neither bigoted nor unconstitutional.

Second, discussion of a candidate’s faith is relevant. During a time of rising unemployment, falling home prices and massive deficits, it is easy to relegate religion as an irrelevant topic. Yet our religious beliefs define the very essence of who we are. Any candidate who claims his religion has no influence on his decisions is either a dishonest politician or a shallow follower of his faith.

...Conservatives spent most of the 2008 election calling for an investigation of Barack Obama’s religious beliefs in relationship to his membership in the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s church. Did he embrace the views of his pastor? Again, a fair question because no religion I’m familiar with allows for a separation of faith from behavior. The question is not whether personal spiritual beliefs shape a politician’s values and policies, but what spiritual beliefs mold those values and policies.

Well, I wish this wasn't the case, because I'd much prefer that our nation's policies be based on facts and values that aren't contaminated by religious dogma. As noted above, when people are unable to offer up solid reasons for why X is preferable to Y, debate quickly degenerates into a "my weird belief is better than your weird belief" exchange that is inimical to open-minded discussion.

I have to admit, though, that Jeffress is telling it like it is.

The United States is a deeply religious nation, god damn it! Atheists and agnostics are a tiny minority of voters. It's difficult to imagine someone non-religious being elected president, or any leader of our country failing to end a State of the Union speech with "And may God bless the United States of America."

So my fallback position is to reluctantly accept that religious values are going to be part of our political discourse. Given that fact, I'll agree with Pastor Jeffress' contention that discussion of a candidate's faith is relevant. 

Back in 2007 I said, "Questioning a politician's religious belief isn't unconstitutional." Indeed, it is essential so long as candidates embrace other-worldly beliefs that affect their preferred policy prescriptions. Here's an excerpt from that blog post:

However, the framers of the Constitution didn't intend religion to be off limits when considering a candidate's qualifications. The Republican presidential candidates, though, want to have it both ways.

They bring up their religious beliefs at every opportunity. Then when someone asks them to answer some specifics about those beliefs, such as whether every word in the Bible is to be taken literally, they're offended that this oh-so-personal aspect of their lives is being brought out for public scrutiny.

Well, if you don't want your religious belief scrutinized, keep it to yourself. If you're running for office, say "I'm a religious person, but my beliefs won't have any impact on how I go about deciding political or policy questions."

If you can't say that, then you've got to expect some serious questioning about what sort of unsubstantiated, subjective, and unscientific world view is going to support your decisions if you're elected.

Will Zeus guide your thoughts and actions? Or God? How about Jesus? And how will you know what your divine source of inspiration requires of you? Do you pray? Study a holy book? Hear messages from above in your head?

These are important and valid questions. I just wish they were asked more often at press conferences and debates.

Religion makes Arab-Israeli conflict much tougher to solve

Tonight, during a wine tasting event, I chatted with a guy about the dismal state of national and international politics.

Opposing positions have gotten absurdly extreme. Republicans have almost nothing in common with Democrats. Israelis have almost nothing in common with Palestinians. With such little common ground, there's no room for two parties at odds with each other to negotiate a mutually acceptable deal.

We talked about how both Jewish Israelis and Muslim Palestinians have an absurd belief that the territory Israel occupied in the 1967 war is "holy" or a "promised land." Absurd, because these religious claims are based on Jewish and Muslim dogmas.

So the supposed truth that Jews are entitled to ownership of the "Holy Land" is founded on statements in a Jewish holy book. Ditto with Palestinian claims to their own holy places, though these don't seem as extreme to me as hard line Israeli faith-based political positions.

There seems to be no end to the haggling over whether, or how, Palestinian statehood should be accomplished. Tomorrow it looks like the Palestinian Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas, will ask the U.N. General Assembly for recognition.

That request likely won't succeed, partly because the United States has tied itself so tightly to Israel (every president lusts after Jewish votes and political contributions), it isn't possible for this country to forcefully push for the "two state" solution reasonable people recognize as the only fair way to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

My wine-tasting companion and I agreed that religion makes the problem much worse. Jews and Christians feel that the "Holy Land" has to stay in the hands of Israel, because this is what the Bible demands, or at least strongly implies.

Where, then, is the wiggle-room for negotiating land swaps with the Palestinian Authority, if fundamentalist Jewish and Christian organizations are convinced that Israel is doing God's will by holding on to land that supposedly is a divine promise to the Jews?

I don't get it when people say, "Religion is a force for good, not for harm."

Just look at Israel and Palestine. I'm pretty sure it wouldn't have taken over sixty years, and coiunting, to resolve their conflicts if religious dogma wasn't making both sides feel that their position is divinely inspired.

John Lennon got it right.

Imagine there's no Heaven
It's easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people
Living for today

Imagine there's no countries
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace

Presidential candidates should be quizzed about religion

To me, there's no place for religion in politics.

Sure, virtually every politician in the United States who occupies a high office will be religious, because this is a highly religious country and voters are biased against atheists. But political decisions should be based on evidence, reasoning, values -- not blind faith in some supernatural force.

(See some previous blog thoughts on this subject here, here, here, and here.)

Bill Keller, Executive Editor of the New York Times, who is about to step down and become a full-time writer, wrote a great piece: Asking Candidates Tougher Questions About Faith. Which starts off...

If a candidate for president said he believed that space aliens dwell among us, would that affect your willingness to vote for him? Personally, I might not disqualify him out of hand; one out of three Americans believe we have had Visitors and, hey, who knows? But I would certainly want to ask a few questions. Like, where does he get his information? Does he talk to the aliens? Do they have an economic plan?

Yet when it comes to the religious beliefs of our would-be presidents, we are a little squeamish about probing too aggressively. Michele Bachmann was asked during the Iowa G.O.P. debate what she meant when she said the Bible obliged her to “be submissive” to her husband, and there was an audible wave of boos — for the question, not the answer. There is a sense, encouraged by the candidates, that what goes on between a candidate and his or her God is a sensitive, even privileged domain, except when it is useful for mobilizing the religious base and prying open their wallets.

Exactly.

Candidates try to have it both ways: they shamelessly use their religiosity to form a bond with like-minded voters, yet get offended when someone asks them probing questions about their beliefs.

Like, "How the hell can we expect that you'd make sound presidential decisions when you believe such ridiculous faith-based religious crap?" That's the sort of question I'd like to ask, but it likely would get me thrown out of a Bachmann campaign event.

Keller, though, is free to ask some excellent questions of the candidates in a companion piece, Tougher Questions for the Candidates. My favorite is:

3. (a) Do you agree with those religious leaders who say that America is a “Christian nation” or “Judeo-Christian nation?” (b) What does that mean in  practice?

Americans get all freaked out when Muslim nations are led by someone who vows fealty to the teachings of the Koran. Yet voters applaud presidential candidates who pledge to bring the Bible back into the classroom and eliminate barriers between church and state.

Huh?

How is it that an Islamic theocracy is bad, while a Christian theocracy is good? What distinguishes our political leaders from fundamentalist crazies in other nations if both believe in seriously strange stuff that has no connection to demonstrable reality?

On that note, Keller has a link to a 2004 story about the Bush administration's snide dismissal of "the reality-based community," of which I am a proud member. Browsing through the lengthy story, I came across this.

In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn't like about Bush's former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House's displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn't fully comprehend -- but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.

The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''

Who besides guys like me are part of the reality-based community? Many of the other elected officials in Washington, it would seem. A group of Democratic and Republican members of Congress were called in to discuss Iraq sometime before the October 2002 vote authorizing Bush to move forward. A Republican senator recently told Time Magazine that the president walked in and said: ''Look, I want your vote. I'm not going to debate it with you.'' When one of the senators began to ask a question, Bush snapped, ''Look, I'm not going to debate it with you.''

There are plenty of domineering, blustering jerks who try to get their way through force, intimidation, tough talk, and stonewalling. Their jerkiosity isn't always faith-based. But often it is.

Religions can bring out the worst in people.

Especially in politicians who already are prone to delusions of grandiosity. it's dangerous when a national leader believes that he or she has a direct personal link to God's will, as this can lead them to pursue policies which have no good reasons behind them other than "I feel it in my gut." (Meaning, the brain's blind faith center.)

Reader comments on New York Times articles often are as thoughtful as the piece itself. Highlighted comments on Heller's piece were no exception. I liked this one from Roxanne M. in New Mexico.

In his autobiography, former French President Jacques Chirac described receiving a call from President Bush in the middle of the night on the eve of the Iraq war. Bush was musing about whether his actions in the Middle East might help to fulfill the divine plan by bringing about Armageddon. The voters have a right to know whether their president's policies are based on rational evidence and suppositions or on crazy religious wish-fulfillment.

Religious beliefs are just that--beliefs. We have no problem questioning a candidates beliefs about economics, social policy or international relations, and expecting him to be able to defend those beliefs on a rational basis. Religion, however, has enjoyed a privileged, off-limits status that may have been fine, back in the good old days when all candidates were conventionally religious, usually Episcopalian, and weren't trying to use their faith as a wedge issue. But when candidates seem to think there is a higher law than the Constitution they are sworn to uphold, it's relevant to know which parts of the Constitution would be at risk under their administration.

Rick Perry's prayer rally reeks of fanaticism

Reading about Texas Governor Rick Perry's prayer rally, which likely is a kickoff to him becoming a Republican candidate for president of the United States, I wonder how his religious fanaticism would be viewed if he were a Muslim speaking of the need for people to embrace Allah and the Koran in order to return our nation to greatness.

"Father, our heart breaks for America. We see discord at home. We see fear in the marketplace. We see anger in the halls of government, and as a nation we have forgotten who made us, who protects us, who blesses us, and for that we cry out for your forgiveness," Perry said.

If someone seeking to lead Egypt talked in this fashion about how Islam had to be the foundation of that country's political processes, lots of Americans would worry about the dangers of Muslim extremism.

But Christian extremism is OK to them. Hypocrisy is running wild in the Republican party these days. In non-Christian countries, they favor "separation of church and state." In the United States, though, bringing God into politics is just fine.

Prayer is Republican plan for deficit reduction

Call me skeptical -- "You're skeptical, Brian!" (thanks) -- but somehow I doubt that praying is going to reduce the federal deficit.

Better come up with a better plan, Republicans.

The national debt is a “moral threat” to the United States, House Speaker John Boehner said Sunday, an impending peril about which some people are realizing they “better start praying."

Toward a more civil and honest discourse

President Obama's speech at yesterday's memorial service for the victims of the Tucson shooting inspired me. So I wanted to share some excerpts from his remarks which bear on any sort of discourse -- including "conversations" on this blog and elsewhere on the Internet.

(Since quite a few visitors here live overseas, a brief background on the events that have shaken up the United States: last Saturday a Congresswoman, Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, was shot in the head by a young man, Jared Loughner, as she was speaking with constituents in Tucson, Arizona. Giffords survived, but six other people were killed by Loughner and many others were hurt.)

Obama said:

You see, when a tragedy like this strikes, it is part of our nature to demand explanations –- to try and pose some order on the chaos and make sense out of that which seems senseless.  Already we’ve seen a national conversation commence, not only about the motivations behind these killings, but about everything from the merits of gun safety laws to the adequacy of our mental health system.  And much of this process, of debating what might be done to prevent such tragedies in the future, is an essential ingredient in our exercise of self-government.

But at a time when our discourse has become so sharply polarized -– at a time when we are far too eager to lay the blame for all that ails the world at the feet of those who happen to think differently than we do -– it’s important for us to pause for a moment and make sure that we’re talking with each other in a way that heals, not in a way that wounds.

These are nicely nuanced thoughts. I get passionate about the dangers of religiosity. Other people are avid defenders of their faith. Spiritual beliefs, or the lack thereof, are akin to the Tucson shootings in this regard: they aren't easily explained.

In fact, I'll go further and say neither can be explained.

The human mind/brain is way too complex and mysterious to be reduced in a simplistic fashion. Thoughts, motivations, emotions, desires, yearnings -- all these and so much more are beyond the ability of anyone, including the individual in whose head all these transpire, to comprehend.

So when some commentators say, "Jared Loughner certainly wasn't affected by hateful, violent political speech," they're just guessing. And when other commentators say that Loughner definitely was spurred on by talk radio or cable TV, they're also guessing.

Likewise, I do my best on this blog to stay away from making inferences about what is, or was, in someone else's mind, since even that person isn't capable of figuring out how unconscious processes in his or her brain end up producing thoughts, emotions, or actions.

All we can do, really, is speak about how we see the world and ourselves.

Yes, it's important that we learn how to talk with each other. But I see this talking as akin to laying our conversational cards on the table in a shared, open space. We shouldn't try to force our own cards into the hand (or mind) of someone else. That, as Obama said, is a way that wounds.

He went on to observe:

As we discuss these issues, let each of us do so with a good dose of humility.  Rather than pointing fingers or assigning blame, let’s use this occasion to expand our moral imaginations, to listen to each other more carefully, to sharpen our instincts for empathy and remind ourselves of all the ways that our hopes and dreams are bound together.

Absolutely.

However, I don't take those two sentences as reflecting any sort of passivity in the face of social, cultural, environmental, political, or other sorts of problems that need to be dealt with.

We are still entitled to hold strong opinions and passionate views. We just should recognize that everybody, including our opponents, are trying to deal with life in the best way they know how. It's important to remember that humans have a lot more in common, than in difference.

Like, how we deal with grief:

So sudden loss causes us to look backward -– but it also forces us to look forward; to reflect on the present and the future, on the manner in which we live our lives and nurture our relationships with those who are still with us.

We may ask ourselves if we’ve shown enough kindness and generosity and compassion to the people in our lives.  Perhaps we question whether we're doing right by our children, or our community, whether our priorities are in order.

We recognize our own mortality, and we are reminded that in the fleeting time we have on this Earth, what matters is not wealth, or status, or power, or fame -– but rather, how well we have loved -- and what small part we have played in making the lives of other people better. 

And that process -- that process of reflection, of making sure we align our values with our actions –- that, I believe, is what a tragedy like this requires.

Each of us is the meaning-maker of our own life.

Yes, we are affected by other people, influenced by natural events, constrained by our predispositions (genetic and otherwise), mystified by unconscious neurological processes over which we have little or no control.

But in the end, we are still responsible for how our unique human consciousness makes sense of all this, and how we treat other people and sentient creatures who are trying to figure out life in their own fashion.

This final excerpt from Obama's speech is my favorite:

If this tragedy prompts reflection and debate -- as it should -- let’s make sure it’s worthy of those we have lost. Let’s make sure it’s not on the usual plane of politics and point-scoring and pettiness that drifts away in the next news cycle.

The loss of these wonderful people should make every one of us strive to be better.  To be better in our private lives, to be better friends and neighbors and coworkers and parents.  And if, as has been discussed in recent days, their death helps usher in more civility in our public discourse, let us remember it is not because a simple lack of civility caused this tragedy -- it did not -- but rather because only a more civil and honest public discourse can help us face up to the challenges of our nation in a way that would make them proud.

As I'vee observed numerous times during the six-plus years since I started this Church of the Churchless blog, we should talk with each other on the Internet no differently than if we were sitting face to face in a coffehouse.

Yet just as "talking heads" on the radio or TV can be astoundingly vitriolic, insulting, and hateful toward people with whom they disagree, so can the distancing anonymity of the Internet foster speech which makes me go "Wow! If this person was in the same room with those he's ranting to, he or she wouldn't be talking that way."

I enjoy conversing on the Internet for the same reason I like talking with people in person: learning, sharing, entertainment, friendship-making, exposure to fresh ideas. May this blog continue to bring enjoyment to me and to others who visit it.

And may our discourse here, as elsewhere, be as civil and honest as possible.

Why politics and fundamentalist Christianity shouldn't mix

Here's a great example of why personal religious beliefs should be kept out of public policy debates: Illinois Congressman John Shimkus citing Genesis in support of his contention that global warming is nothing to worry about.

 

He's standing by his remarks, made in 2009, that everything will be fine because God promised He wouldn't destroy the Earth after Noah's flood.

The Illinois Republican running for the powerful perch atop the House Energy and Commerce Committee told POLITICO on Wednesday that his understanding of the Bible reaffirms his belief that government shouldn't be in the business of trying to address rising greenhouse gas emissions.

"I do believe in the Bible as the final word of God," Shimkus said. "And I do believe that God said the Earth would not be destroyed by a flood.

Truly bizarre. Even more astonishing is that many Americans undoubtedly feel it's perfectly OK to base vitally important national policy decisions on myths from a pre-scientific era.

Well, we're in for a rough couple of years in Congress if Republicans allow legislation to be based on weird religious beliefs rather than solid facts. Openly debating the science of climate change is one thing; sticking one's head in the sand and spouting scripture is wholly/holy different.

Like I said before, and surely will say again, "Religious values have no place in politics."

What God is Glenn Beck talking about?

I've been underwhelmed by the religious'y "Restoring Honor" Glenn Beck rally held in Washington D.C. yesterday. Beck's big message was faith, hope, charity.

Wow. What a non-big, and vague, theological surprise.

Our country would supposedly do better if people had more faith in something (God, presumably), had more hope in something (not sure what), and were more charitable (beneficiary of largesse left undefined).

After reading some news reports of what was said at the rally, I'm left with significant philosophical questions and political worries.

On the philosophy front, I'm wondering what God we're supposed to turn back to, as Beck urged.

"Something beyond imagination is happening," he said. "America today begins to turn back to God."

Beck exhorted the crowd to "recognize your place to the creator. Realize that He is our king. He is the one who guides and directs our life and protects us."

Well, all sorts of religions and spiritual teachings refer to God. I've got a Yoga book called "How to know God." With all the interest in Yoga these days, maybe Glenn Beck was talking about embracing Patanjali's sutras.

I sort of doubt it, though. I also suspect that Beck wasn't urging the crowd to worship Allah, which is simply the Arabic name for "God."

Beck reportedly talked a lot about this nation's Founding Fathers, many (if not most) of whom were Deists. Wikipedia says:

Deism (pronounced /ˈdiːɪzəm/, us dict: dē′·ĭzm)^[1][2] is a religious and philosophical belief that a supreme being created the universe, and that this (and religious truth in general) can be determined using reason and observation of the natural world alone, without the need for either faith or organized religion.

Hmmmm.

Our Founding Fathers, such as Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and John Adams, rejected faith and organized religion. Yet somehow Glenn Beck was able to urge Americans to do the opposite of what our founders practiced in the name of restoring this country to its original values.

I guess this is why PolitiFact's Truth-o-Meter has given Glenn Beck statements eight "false" and "pants-on-fire" ratings, and only two "true" or "mostly true." For a guy who talks about morals so much, it's strange that Beck is so OK with lying.

What bothered me the most about Beck's rally was the attempt to make Christianity into a state religion.

Martin Luther King's niece, Alveda King, is an anti-abortion activist. She came on stage to urge that prayer be put back in schools and the public square. That's how Saudi Arabia and Iran operate. Do we really want to turn our schools into Christian madrasahs?

When I channel surf my way onto conservative talk radio, sometimes I hear crazy talk of how Shariah (Islamic) law is coming to America. Yet Beck and his right-wing colleagues see nothing wrong with imposing some sort of ill-defined Biblical law upon United States citizens.

That said, there's obviously nothing much wrong -- and a lot right -- with faith, hope, and charity. The question is, as with the definition of "God," what exactly are we talking about?

The values of Beck's rally were "faith, hope, and charity."  At first glance most people would agree with these values, including President Obama.  However, disagreements arise when people start talking about what those values really mean as applied to society.

Does faith mean that only the Christian faith as the freedom to build a place of worship wherever they wish, or does it also include the right of a group to build a mosque two blocks away from Ground Zero?

Does hope mean providing every person hope through a government financed college education, or does hope mean that some individuals college dream dies because of a lack of financing?

Does charity involve the government playing a role in helping the poor, or relying on individuals to help the poor through voluntary donations (sparse as they may be)?

"Ground zero" mosque dispute fanned by supernaturalism

When I read the facts about the Islamic mosque planned for a site a few blocks from "ground zero," a.k.a. the spot where the World Trade Center towers once stood, it's difficult to understand what all the fuss is about.

There already is a mosque four blocks from ground zero. So what's the big deal with having one two blocks away? Plus, the proposed development actually is a cultural center, which will include a mosque.

As a Washington post story says (registration may be required to read it):

The plan is for a cultural center that would contain a mosque.

The project's organizers have said that the center would be modeled on Manhattan's 92nd Street Y, a community center open to all New Yorkers. The center would house meeting rooms, a fitness center, a swimming pool, a basketball court, a restaurant and culinary school, a library, a 500-seat auditorium, a mosque and a Sept. 11 memorial and reflection space. The organizers have estimated that the mosque could attract as many as 2,000 worshipers on Fridays.

So again, what's the big deal?

There's talk about one or more of the people involved with the Islamic cultural center being unduly radical. Well, if he's a terrorist, charge him with something. But if he isn't breaking any laws, isn't free speech still allowed in the United States?

Some people rant on about mosques being hothouses of Al Qaeda'ish radicalism. OK, if this is true, why are any mosques allowed to stay open in this country? Why isn't there a call for the existing mosque four blocks from ground zero to be shut down?

I think a big part of the answer is found in two words: hallowed ground. This phrase comes up a lot in stories about the proposed "Park51" cultural center/mosque. Hallowed ground is sacred, holy, revered. It isn't plain old ground; something supernatural has been added on to it.

This shows how religiosity complicates social and political issues, introducing metaphysical nonsense into debates that should be carried out much more calmly and rationally.

Those opposed to the cultural center say it is disrespectful to have a mosque so close to the World Trade Center site. I can't understand why. There already are mosques close to ground zero. Why not have another one?

The reason, so far as I can understand it, seems to be that some people imagine that a "hallowsphere" extends out from where the World Trade Center towers stood. Nobody can see or sense it, like God. But they believe that it exists and makes the ground underneath it hallowed.

That's ridiculous.

If people have strong feelings against a mosque in the area, they should simply say: "I object to a mosque anywhere near ground zero." And then give their reasons why. Arguing that a mosque can't go on hallowed ground is to say nothing -- it's just gibberish.

I loved my mother. I still love her. However, following her funeral I've never been back to where her ashes are interred. It has no meaning for me. My mother isn't there. My mother lives on in my memories of her, not in the cemetary ground.

(In fact, I'm not absolutely sure that her ashes are even there. I can't remember whether the granite marker has anything underneath it.)

Similarly, there's nothing sacred about the ground under or near the World Trade Center site. "Sacred" exists within the minds of human beings, not in objective reality. So I don't like all this talk about hallowed ground.

There's no such thing as hallowed ground, sacred ground, holy ground.

There only are people who feel that some places are hallowed, sacred, or holy. So it'd be a lot better if the debate over the mosque didn't include any "hallow" talk. Then we could focus on the real issues -- not supernaturalism.

Judge's gay marriage ruling is putdown of religion

Out here on the left west coast people are pretty tolerant and open-minded, by and large. For example, in a few months Californians are going to vote on legalizing marijuana. Oregon probably will follow in 2012.

So I was surprised when a ban on gay marriage passed in California a few years ago.

Now that a federal judge, Vaughn Walker, has declared the ban unconsitutional, it's becoming more obvious why voters were taken in by the spurious arguments of Proposition 8.

Religion is the main culprit. A front page story in yesterday's The Oregonian contained these telling quotes:

Walker, in a 136-page ruling, said California "has no interest in differentiating between same-sex and opposite-sex unions."

"The evidence shows conclusively that moral and religious views form the only basis for a belief that same-sex couples are different from opposite-sex couples, Walker wrote. The ruling struck down Proposition 8 as a violation of federal constitutional guarantees of equal protection and due process.

Walker cited extensive trial evidence to support his finding that there was not even a rational basis for excluding gays and lesbians from marriage.

Evidence. Facts. Rationality. These are the minor details that the proponents of Proposition 8 failed to bring to the courtroom. So it's no wonder their case fell flat.

But when I saw them interviewed on cable news, the gay-marriage haters were completely in denial. They obviously continued to believe that mere belief was sufficient justification to strip citizens of their constitutional rights.

This is a great example of how religiosity causes true believers to distance themselves from reality. They end up inhabiting a solipsistic world where their saying so supposedly makes it so.

Fortunately, this isn't how the American legal system works. Judge Walker's ruling shows that religious belief should carry just as much weight as any other sort of belief. Namely, essentially zero.

"State your case, counselor."
"I believe my client is innocent, judge."
"That's it? You're not going to present any evidence?"
"No, your honor. I trust you will believe like I do."

That legal strategy isn't going to win over any competent judge. Nor should a similar sort of theological strategy convert people to religion, but unfortunately it does.

I think this is why the supporters of Proposition 8 are so hugely irritated at Judge Walker. He saw through their simplistic evidence-less moralism. He recognized that religious bigotry is an emperor who has no clothes and boldly said you're naked in those 136 pages.

Same-sex couples are no different from opposite-sex couples in their ability to raise children and form a loving, harmonious marriage.

That's a fact.

So if someone wants to object to gay marriage, they can do so -- but they won't be able to support that opinion with demonstrable research-based facts. This was made clear in Judge Walker's well-reasoned ruling.

Here's a collection of his most pointed statements.

I've shared some that discuss the role of fact-less religious belief in this case. If the existence of God were on trial, a judge would also have to rule that the defense has failed to prove its point. Walker wrote:

During closing arguments, proponents again focused on the contention that "responsible procreation is really at the heart of society's interest in regulating marriage." When asked to identify the evidence at trial that supported this contention, proponents' counsel replied, "you don't have to have evidence of this point."

Blankenhorn lacks the qualifications to offer opinion testimony and, in any event, failed to provide cogent testimony in support of proponents' factual assertions. ... His opinion lacks reliability, as there is simply too great an analytical gap between the data and the opinion Blankenhorn proffered. ... Blankenhorn was unwilling to answer many questions directly on cross-examination and was defensive in his answers. Moreover, much of his testimony contradicted his opinions.

An initiative measure adopted by the voters deserves great respect. The considered views and opinions of even the most highly qualified scholars and experts seldom outweigh the determinations of the voters. When challenged, however, the voters' determinations must find at least some support in evidence. This is especially so when those determinations enact into law classifications of persons. Conjecture, speculation and fears are not enough. Still less will the moral disapprobation of a group or class of citizens suffice, no matter how large the majority that shares that view. The evidence demonstrated beyond serious reckoning that Proposition 8 finds support only in such disapproval. As such, Proposition 8 is beyond the constitutional reach of the voters or their representatives.

Plaintiffs questioned [political scientist Kenneth] Miller on data showing 84 percent of those who attend church weekly voted yes on Proposition 8, 54 percent of those who attend church occasionally voted no on Proposition 8 and 83 percent of those who never attend church voted no on Proposition 8.

That the majority of California voters supported Proposition 8 is irrelevant, as "fundamental rights may not be submitted to [a] vote; they depend on the outcome of no elections."

Proponents' argument that tradition prefers opposite-sex couples to same-sex couples equates to the notion that opposite-sex relationships are simply better than same-sex relationships.

Tradition alone cannot legitimate this purported interest. Plaintiffs presented evidence showing conclusively that the state has no interest in preferring opposite-sex couples to same-sex couples or in preferring heterosexuality to homosexuality. Moreover, the state cannot have an interest in disadvantaging an unpopular minority group simply because the group is unpopular.

The evidence shows that the state advances nothing when it adheres to the tradition of excluding same-sex couples from marriage. Proponents' asserted state interests in tradition are nothing more than tautologies and do not amount to rational bases for Proposition 8.

California's obligation is to treat its citizens equally, not to "mandate [its] own moral code."

"[M]oral disapproval, without any other asserted state interest," has never been a rational basis for legislation.

Proposition 8 fails to advance any rational basis in singling out gay men and lesbians for denial of a marriage license. Indeed, the evidence shows Proposition 8 does nothing more than enshrine in the California Constitution the notion that opposite sex couples are superior to same-sex couples.

"Saint" Sarah Palin shows danger of mixing religion & politics

Often people say, "What's the harm if people believe in whatever religion they want to, no matter how weird it might seem to others?"

Well, here's a good example of some harm: the June 21, 2010 cover of Newsweek. The caption under the photo of Palin with a halo and hands prayerfully folded reads:

Saint Sarah

What Palin's appeal to conservative Christian women says about feminism and the future of the religious right.

I've been told by a friend who was born in Germany, visits Europe regularly, and keeps up on European goings-on directly via reading online news sources that politicians in Europe keep religion almost completely separate from their professional lives.

She says that if someone bragged about how religious they are during a political campaign, he or she probably would lose. Whereas in the United States, it's almost imperative for anyone who aspires to a high national office to profess their faith.

I'm not disturbed about Palin's Christian religiosity. But when she makes it a central feature of her political views, and even states that she's on a "mission from God," that's dangerous.

(Which reminds me: the Vatican recently announced that "The Blues Brothers" movie, where Jake and Elwood are on a mission from God to save the orphanage they were raised in, is a Catholic classic. Good move, Vatican. We finally agree on something.)

I've argued before that religious values have no place in politics.

Reading the Newsweek cover story only strengthened my conviction that when people choose a political leader on the basis of his or her religious beliefs, we're much less likely to end up with someone competent.

Here's some quotes from the story. Part of what's so scary about them is how many American voters would find them totally acceptable as a reflection of the political process.

To millions of women, Palin's authenticity makes her a sister in arms...

To a smaller number she is a prophet, ordained by God for a special role in the cosmic battle against the forces of evil. A 2009 profile in the Christian magazine Charisma compared Palin to the Old Testament Queen Esther, who saved her people, in this case the Jews, from annihilation. 

...Like many evangelicals, Garza believes a great cosmic battle is underway for the soul of America and that Palin has been singled out by God for leadership: "The annointing on her is so strong," she says. Assaults on Palin by the press only strengthen Garza's conviction, for as any Christian knows, martyrs most deserve to gain God's kingdom.

"She's just fearless," Garza says. "Jesus said, 'They persecuted me; they'll persecute you." To her Christian audiences, Palin talks about her own life in terms of mission and destiny.

She was the keynote speaker at a Women of Joy conference in April... Upon mounting the stage, Palin immediately thanked her "prayer warriors" for the "prayer shield" they built around her.

Wow. Sometimes I wish I Iived in Europe.

(If Palin ever became president of the United States, I might be seriously drawn to do that -- at least one poll early this year had her leading the Republican presidential pack for 2012.)

When lots of voters think that criticism of a candidate makes him or her more appealing, because more Christian martyr'ish, this is flat out weird. When lots of voters believe that a political leader has been annointed by God to hold high office, that's doubly weird.

Elections should be based on how well a candidate is believed to be able to solve problems and guide the ship of state, not on their "saintliness."

I doubt very much that Palin ever will become President, but if she does, this will show beyond a shadow of doubt that religion should be kept far distant from politics.

Texas dismisses Thomas Jefferson from schools

We didn't need more evidence that religious fundamentalists are dangerous wackos who seek to undermine American freedom and independence -- but, sadly, here it is:

The Texas State Board of Education removed Thomas Jefferson from the school curriculum, replacing him with John Calvin, who, not surprisingly, also was a religious wacko.

Jefferson, on the other hand, held unconventional Christian beliefs and strongly argued for the separation of church and state. He also, of course, was the third president of the United States, the principal author of the Declaration of Independence, and one of the most influential Founding Fathers of the United States.

But in Texas he doesn't exist. Not according to the conservative-dominated state school board. A live blog report shows it only took twenty-one minutes to erase Jefferson.

9:30 – Board member Cynthia Dunbar wants to change a standard having students study the impact of Enlightenment ideas on political revolutions from 1750 to the present. She wants to drop the reference to Enlightenment ideas (replacing with “the writings of”) and to Thomas Jefferson. She adds Thomas Aquinas and others. Jefferson’s ideas, she argues, were based on other political philosophers listed in the standards. We don’t buy her argument at all. Board member Bob Craig of Lubbock points out that the curriculum writers clearly wanted students to study Enlightenment ideas and Jefferson. Could Dunbar’s problem be that Jefferson was a Deist? The board approves the amendment, taking Thomas Jefferson OUT of the world history standards.

9:40 – We’re just picking ourselves up off the floor. The board’s far-right faction has spent months now proclaiming the importance of emphasizing America’s exceptionalism in social studies classrooms. But today they voted to remove one of the greatest of America’s Founders, Thomas Jefferson, from a standard about the influence of great political philosophers on political revolutions from 1750 to today.

9:45 – Here’s the amendment Dunbar changed: “explain the impact of Enlightenment ideas from John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, Voltaire, Charles de Montesquieu, Jean Jacques Rousseau, and Thomas Jefferson on political revolutions from 1750 to the present.” Here’s Dunbar’s replacement standard, which passed: “explain the impact of the writings of John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, Voltaire, Charles de Montesquieu, Jean Jacques Rousseau,  Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin and Sir William Blackstone.” Not only does Dunbar’s amendment completely change the thrust of the standard. It also appalling drops one of the most influential political philosophers in American history — Thomas Jefferson.

9:51 – Dunbar’s amendment striking Jefferson passed with the votes of the board’s far-right members and board member Geraldine “Tincy” Miller of Dallas.

Is this un-American, unpatriotic, and incredibly stupid? Yes.

Republicans on the Texas State Board of Education also don't want school children to know about the prohibition of a government-sponsored religion in the Bill of Rights, since they clearly are out to make their brand of fundamentalist Christianity into just that.

To hell with the Constitution. To hell with Thomas Jefferson. To hell with academic standards. (Amazingly, the board revised the curriculum without any input from scholars, classroom teachers, or experts in the social sciences.)

On the plus side, this outrage against history probably is leading many people to dig into why Thomas Jefferson is so threatening to religious true believers. I'm one of them.

This morning I found my copy of "The Godless Constitution" and turned to the chapter, The "Infidel" Mr. Jefferson. I learned that in the 1800 presidential race between Thomas Jefferson and John Adams:

The floodgates of Christian anger opened upon Jefferson in a concerted effort to paint him as a "French infidel" and a "howling atheist." The Reverend William Linn, a Dutch Reformed minister in New York, wrote a pamphlet opposing Jefferson because of "his disbelief of the Holy Scriptures; or in other words his rejection of the Christian Religion and open profession of Deism."

Jefferson had plenty of company among our nation's Founding Fathers (sorry for the sexist language, but this is what the founders almost always are called; I guess there weren't any Founding Mothers).

This is a first for me -- quoting from an Ayn Rand web site -- but it speaks the truth.

As the quotes on this page illustrate, the claim that America was founded on Christianity is a myth. Many of the Founding Fathers and Revolutionary War leaders were Deists, and upheld a firm separation of church and state.

Here's some additional quotes from "The Godless Constitution" that point to Thomas Jefferson's Enlightenment values. He'd never be able to be elected to high office today, even though Jefferson is considered one of our greatest presidents.

Jefferson had suggested (as we noted in the last chapter) that it was not of interest to the state whether his neighbor believed in twenty gods or no God, since "it neither breaks my leg, nor picks my pocket."

The second offensive passage appears in Jefferson's argument that only reason, persuasion, and free inquiry, not governmental coercion, find and advance truth.

---------------------

It was this strident Enlightenment rationalism, his constant juxtaposition of reason and superstition, free inquiry and religious coercion, that made Jefferson seem so dangerous a threat to his Christian enemies.

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[To Jefferson] Priests were the subverters of reason and enlightenment, for centuries duping decent Christians into "burning and torturing one another for abstractions which no one of them understand." They weave "spells" for their flocks, "moulding their minds as wax in the hollows of their hands." All priests, Jefferson claimed, "dread the advance of science as witches do the approach of daylight."

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Outspokenly anticlerical and vigilant to exclude religion from public life as he may have been, Jefferson was, it must be emphasized, not himself a godless man. He was in fact living proof of his own argument that religion as private conviction could flourish without public endorsement.

---------------------

He believed fervently in the one God who had created all men equal. While never formally abandoning the Episcopalianism of his Virginia youth, he usually identified himself as a Unitarian. In this respect he was deeply influenced by the writings of his scientific friend the Reverend Joseph Priestley.

They both rejected the Trinity as a "metaphysical insanity" and shared the general deistic rejection of the miracles of the Bible, the divinity of Christ, and the doctrines of original sin and blood atonement. Jefferson, in fact, predicted that one day in a rational America everyone would be a Unitarian.

---------------------

Far from being one of "the bitterest enemies of Christ," as the Reverend Mason claimed in 1800, Jefferson embraced a personal religion shaped by the life and teachings of Jesus. He called his own creed "the philosophy of Jesus" and referred often to "the purity and sublimity of his moral precepts."

Thomas Jefferson said, ""I am of a sect by myself, as far as I know." He made up his own Bible, leaving out the unbelievable stuff. (You can read it here.) For his churchlessness alone, not to mention his other accomplishments, Jefferson deserves better than being disrespected by the Texas State Board of Education.

I shall honor his contributions to the United States and the world by vowing to never set foot in Texas (unless absolutely necessary) or watch a Dallas Cowboys football game (only the cheerleaders).

Evidence of Rumsfeld's Christian war

Here's a great example of how unsupported religious beliefs get mixed up with politics and foreign policy, helping lead to war:

Slides of former Bush defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld's briefings to the White House where he juxtaposed war images with inspirational Bible quotes.

Take a look.

Sarah Palin's Christianity is scarily senseless

Yesterday I thought I'd pushed the car radio button that brought up Oregon Public Broadcasting, so I wasn't all that surprised to hear Sarah Palin's distinctive voice.

It appeared that she was being interviewed by someone with a Christian bent. I figured that an excerpt from the interview was being played so it could be discussed from OPB's usual moderate perspective.

But Palin and the man she was speaking with kept on talking. I heard her refer to him as "Dr. Dobson." That spurred me to glance at the radio setting.

Oh my God! I had stumbled onto the dark side! Somehow I'd tuned in an FM station that carried Dobson's Focus on the Family brand of dogmatic fundamentalism.

I felt like a churchless eavesdropper, since I was getting an inside peek at how Palin describes her faith when she's on comfortable Christian media ground -- as contrasted with the godless mainstream reporters who have such unreasonable expectations for her.

Such as, that she be able to speak in coherent English sentences and make at least minimal sense.

You can listen to her conversation with Dobson here. I started to play the interview again, but I couldn't stomach hearing Palin and Dobson mangle rationality and reason in such an absurd fashion.

I recall that Dobson talked about how her detractors make fun of her Christianity.

Well, that's to be expected when someone expresses such ridiculous religious beliefs. If Palin or any other believer doesn't want to be mocked, they should keep their more bizarre notions to themselves.

Case in point: Palin and Dobson said that God is in charge of things here on Earth, but we also have free will. That's a big "but" which didn't come in for the serious philosophical discussion that it deserved.

So I got abjectly confused by how prayer was supposed to enter into the presidential election. On the one hand, Palin said the election is in God's hands and that however it turns out will be the right thing for America.

For a second I thought a miracle had happened. Palin's mind seemed to be on a halfway reasonable track.

In another interview I remember her trying to claim that she agreed with Abraham Lincoln when he said that God wasn't on either side in the Civil War, and that our job wasn't to tell God what to do but to accept His will.

Pretty clearly, though, this wasn't where she and Dobson wanted to head theologically. Because there was a lot of talk about how people are praying for her and McCain, which means that God should have a favorite in the election.

David Waters takes issue:

Last time I checked, Dr. Dobson, all four candidates on the major party presidential tickets are unabashed Christians. All four have had the "courage" to speak the name of Christ. Aren't all four deserving of our Christian prayers and appreciation?

Well, not in my view, since I don't see how a believer in an omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent personal God can justify telling the Big Guy/Gal Upstairs how to run a universe.

It seems obvious that Palin and Dobson are simply trying to use religion to justify their personal political preferences. And that isn't right. It's absolutely wrong.

A psychologist who used to be a fundamentalist, Valerie Tarico, has written a devastating "Open Letter to Sarah Palin."

She understands how deluded true believers like Palin are able to twist their minds into contorted knots and view anyone who doesn't share their dogmatism as a tool of the Devil.

You cannot affirm basic human decency or capability, because according to your dogma, we are sinful, weak, and dependent on God. And so, your decisions would not be based on expert advice or even your own reasoning, but on your gut-level, intuitive interpretation of God's will. This would allow you to do anything and claim you were led by God.

Your thinking necessarily is black or white. People and policies are either good or bad. After all, Jesus said, "He who is not with me is against me" (Matt. 12:30). Under your leadership, diplomacy and cultural nuance would be less important than not blinking. In a spiritual war, you don't negotiate with the devil.

Regarding social policy, as a believer in individual salvation, you would emphasize individual morality and responsibility, not a community approach with structural solutions. You would be judgmental and controlling of personal choices regarding sex, reproduction, and library books instead of addressing global warming, torture, poverty, and war.

Your belief in eternal hell-fire, your deference to a literal Bible despite its cruelties and vengeful god, and your indoctrination to disbelieve your own compassionate instincts, are likely to leave you numb at your moral core. You might recall the verse, "If a man will not work he shall not eat" (2 Thess. 3:10). However, faith-based initiatives would be okay because they would use caring to evangelize.

I can't begin to imagine how scary a McCain - Palin administration would be for this country -- and the world. Fortunately, polls show that Americans are putting their campaign on life support.

That's great. But on November 4 we've got to be sure to kill this angry, judgmental, ill-informed, unethical fundamentalist beast, the final gasp of George Bush's failed policies.

Pray for McCain-Palin (they need it)

Thanks to Pharyngula, I learned about a Pray for McCain-Palin web site, which I was pleased to visit, adding my voice to a poll about whether McCain's pick of Palin made me more or less likely to vote for him.

I'm totally supportive of this site. It's hard to think of anyone who needs prayer more than John McCain and Sarah Palin. (Proof, here and here.)

In case you're not sure about how to pray, the site provides some helpful specific prayer requests. My favorite is:

Pray for the peace of mind of the candidates & their families and that they will be able to weather Satan's attacks

Why, what could they mean by this? Hmmmm, maybe this.

Well, I see this as a lot more Satanic. Maybe McCain and Palin need to look at their own campaign rallies for evidence of Satan's attacks.

McCain campaign says God wants Obama to lose

Reason number 439,816 to not vote for John McCain (don't have time to list rest of them):

A minister delivering the invocation at a McCain rally asked that God protect His reputation by orchestrating an Obama loss – since non-Christians are rooting for McCain's opponent.

"There are millions of people around this world praying to their god—whether it's Hindu, Buddha, Allah—that his opponent wins, for a variety of reasons. And Lord, I pray that you will guard your own reputation, because they're going to think that their God is bigger than you, if that happens," said Arnold Conrad, the former pastor of Grace Evangelical Free Church in Davenport.

Well, I'm not a Christian and I support Obama. And it's true that most of the world wants to see Obama become president.

But Rev. Conrad shows the sort of narrow-mindedness that is driving independents, moderates, and the churchless away from McCain.

I'm sure right-wing fundamentalists love God is on our side talk, but to other voters it sounds as ridiculous as it is.

I’m praying that Sarah Palin never becomes V.P.

Though Sarah Palin's hotness makes her more appealing to look at, compared to the usual wrinkled right-wing religious white guys, her Christian zealotry is just as scarily ridiculous.

Scary, because here's a God is on my side true believer who could, just possibly, heaven help us, be a heartbeat away from the presidency.

Oh, wait! We already have a president like that. So what's the problem with another one?

Lots. By comparison, Sarah Palin actually makes George Bush look minimally competent and well-informed. So her astounding fatuous cluelessness, when combined with her trite Christian fundamentalism, results in an exceptionally dangerous political mix.

Sam Harris nails her to his non-believer cross in a cogent Newsweek piece, "When Atheists Attack."

We have endured eight years of an administration that seemed touched by religious ideology. Bush's claim to Bob Woodward that he consulted a "higher Father" before going to war in Iraq got many of us sitting upright, before our attention wandered again to less ethereal signs of his incompetence. For all my concern about Bush's religious beliefs, and about his merely average grasp of terrestrial reality, I have never once thought that he was an over-the-brink, Rapture-ready extremist.

Palin seems as though she might be the real McCoy. With the McCain team leading her around like a pet pony between now and Election Day, she can be expected to conceal her religious extremism until it is too late to do anything about it. Her supporters know that while she cannot afford to "talk the talk" between now and Nov. 4, if elected, she can be trusted to "walk the walk" until the Day of Judgment.

Recently I opined that craziness can be a dose of sanity. Absolutely. We all need some sort of way out there to balance the humdrum, practical, sensible side of life.

But my caveat is that our healthy weirdness shouldn't unduly interfere with other people's ability to live their own lives as they see fit. If you want to ski black diamond runs in an icy snowstorm, great. Just don't run into someone else.

Sarah Palin's religiosity, like that of so many other fundamentalists, crosses way over the line in this regard.

I've got no problem with her believing that God speaks to her. However, when she uses this supposedly divine inspiration as a foundation for public policy, now Palin becomes a freaky true believer who shouldn't be allowed to get near the Oval Office.

In her church, Palin has prayed that the Iraq war is a "task that is from God." Ditto for a natural gas pipeline through Canada.

This probably explains why Palin is so fond of saying that she "doesn't blink." Meaning, I guess, that when fresh facts come into view, she keeps on staring at God's vision that she's fantasized in her mind. Harris writes:

What is so unnerving about the candidacy of Sarah Palin is the degree to which she represents – and her supporters celebrate – the joyful marriage of confidence and ignorance. Watching her deny to Gibson [Charlie, of ABC News] that she had ever harbored the slightest doubt about her readiness to take command of the world's only superpower, one got the feeling that Plain would gladly assume any responsibility on earth:

"Governor Palin, are you ready at this moment to perform surgery on this child's brain?"

"Of course, Charlie. I have several boys of my own, and I'm an avid hunter."

"But governor, this is neurosurgery, and you have no training as a surgeon of any kind."

"That's just the point, Charlie. The American people want change in how we make medical decisions in this country. And when faced with a challenge, you cannot blink."

Well, Palin can pray in her fashion, and I'll pray in mine.

Dear God, if there is one, which there probably isn't, but just in case, hear my plea: Do not, repeat do not, allow Sarah Palin and John McCain to win the election in November.

God rejects prayers for rain on Obama

Excellent news for those of us who want Obama to win in November: God is on his side!

You want proof? Easy. Anti-Obama Christians have been praying for rain in Denver tomorrow, to wash out his outdoor acceptance speech.

Here's the forecast. 0% chance of precipitation. Will a miracle happen? Odds aren't zero, but close to it.

Obama outshines McCain in faith forum

I doubt that Barack Obama will be using a Church of the Churchless endorsement in his presidential campaign, but I'll offer it anyway: he got more kudos from me than John McCain did as I watched yesterdays' "Civil Forum" sponsored by Rick Warren's Camelback Church.

Still, neither candidate impressed me from a churchless perspective. No big surprise. Heck, they were speaking in a church. And trying to appeal to evangelical voters.

Both Obama and McCain struck me as sincere. Each has deeply felt religious convictions, so far as I could tell. I expected McCain to be less comfortable in the Forum, since he doesn't speak about religion as much as Obama does, but he was surprisingly at ease.

(Some are wondering that this might be because he knew some of the questions ahead of time, not really being in a "cone of silence" while Obama was interviewed by Warren.)

Obama's brand of Christianity is much more palatable to me than McCain's is. Their answers to a question about evil were especially telling.

Each was asked, "Does evil exist, and if it does, do we ignore it, do we negotiate with it, do we contain it, or do we defeat it?"

Obama's answer can be read here. I liked this part of it.

Now, the one thing that I think is very important is for us to have some humility in how we approach the issue of confronting evil, but you know a lot of evil has been perpetuated based on the claim that we were trying to confront evil.

Contrast this nuanced and thoughtful response with what McCain said:

Defeat it. Couple points. One, if I'm president of the United States, my friends, if I have to follow him to the gates of hell, I will get Osama bin Laden and bring him to justice. I will do that and I know how to do that. I will get that done.

Those words are straight from his stump speech. No thought went into them, no consideration about what the nature of evil is, no recognition that while "evil" vs. "good" makes for good applause lines, the line between these concepts is blurry rather than clear cut – as Obama pointed out.

Plus, if McCain knows how to capture Osama bin Laden, why hasn't he told the Bush administration how to do it?

Unfortunately, as a CNN commentator pointed out, McCain's religious style likely will connect emotionally more with Middle America.

Obama was more thoughtful, and thinking doesn't mesh very well with religion for lots of people. He should get most of the churchless vote though, for what that's worth (not much, sadly).

Dobson’s illogical attack on Obama

"Illogical" and "fundamentalist" are so closely associated, it isn't big news when a closed-minded evangelist says stuff that makes me go Huh?

But James Dobson has broken new ground in crazy ass theological reasoning, as described in a CNN story: "Evangelist accuses Obama of 'distorting' Bible."

Dobson is righteously pissed at Obama for making terrific religious sense.

In comments aired on his radio show Tuesday, Focus on the Family founder James Dobson criticized the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee for comments he made in a June 2006 speech to the liberal Christian group Call to Renewal.

In the speech, Obama suggested that it would be impractical to govern based solely on the word of the Bible, noting that some passages suggest slavery is permissible and eating shellfish is disgraceful.

Recently I wrote about Obama's speech, noting that he should get the churchless vote based on his well-reasoned sentiments.

Which, it turns out, also reflect the attitudes of most religious believers. Yesterday the Pew Research Center released more results from a major survey of Americans. Here's an excerpt from a summary, "Religion in America: Non-Dogmatic, Diverse and Politically Relevant."

A major survey by the Pew Research Center's Forum on Religion & Public Life finds that most Americans have a non-dogmatic approach to faith. A majority of those who are affiliated with a religion, for instance, do not believe their religion is the only way to salvation. And almost the same number believes that there is more than one true way to interpret the teachings of their religion. This openness to a range of religious viewpoints is in line with the great diversity of religious affiliation, belief and practice that exists in the United States, as documented in a survey of more than 35,000 Americans that comprehensively examines the country's religious landscape.

That's good news. Because it puts fundamentalists like Dobson in a decided minority, where, the great Tao willing, they'll remain.

Somehow Dobson isn't able to see the absurdity of his theological position. He faulted Obama for referring to Old Testament injunctions, saying they are no longer relevant to New Testament teachings.

OK. So Dobson is fine with picking and choosing what to believe in the Bible. Yet the CNN story goes on to quote Dobson as saying, ""I think he's deliberately distorting the traditional understanding of the Bible to fit his own world view, his own confused theology."

Well, Mr. Dobson, the traditional understanding of the Bible is that it is God's inerrant word, through and through – both the Old and New Testaments.

You just said that much of the Old Testament can be ignored. The stuff that's antiquated or irrelevant. Who decides what parts to ignore, Mr. Dobson? You've got your opinion. Other Christians and Jews would differ with you.

Where's the "fundamental" in your fundamentalism now? Gone. Except you won't recognize it. You should. Particularly if you want to appeal to the clear majority of religious believers.

Most Americans also have a non-dogmatic approach when it comes to interpreting the tenets of their own religion. For instance, more than two-thirds of adults affiliated with a religious tradition agree that there is more than one true way to interpret the teachings of their faith, a pattern that occurs in nearly all traditions. The exceptions are Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses, 54% and 77% of whom, respectively, say there is only one true way to interpret the teachings of their religion.

Well, what would you expect? Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses are way out there, even when compared to normal unfounded religious speculation.

Here's more evidence of Dobson's illogical way of looking at the world: he completely misunderstood Obama's call to frame religious beliefs in a universal fashion when debating public policy. Obama has said:

I do make the argument that it's important for folks like myself, who think faith is important, that we try to translate some of our concerns into universal language so we can have open and vigorous debate rather than having religion divide us.

And Dobson mistakenly takes this to mean:

Am I required in a democracy to conform my efforts in the political arena to his bloody notion of what is right with regard to the lives of tiny babies? What he's trying to say here is, unless everybody agrees, we have no right to fight for what we believe.

No, Mr. Dobson, that isn't what Obama is saying. Like most zealots, you only hear what fits with your rigid preconceptions. Open your mind – just a crack. Let some reality in.

The Pew Survey shows that most Americans realize that ours is a pluralistic society, religiously and in many other ways. People believe all kinds of things. There's no unanimity of belief even among Christians.

So if we're going to talk and debate with each other, about abortion or any other sensitive social subject, we've got to go beyond narrow theological confines. As soon as you start citing Scripture, I'm going to tune you out. And so are countless other citizens who don't have the same view of the Bible as you do.

How would you like it if I demanded that you agree with the teachings of the Tao Te Ching, because they're obviously the way society should be governed. No debate possible. I'm a Taoist fundamentalist.

That would irk you no end, wouldn't it? "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." Sound familiar, Mr. Dobson? Check out Matthew 7:12. Some parts of the Bible are worth taking seriously.

Obama recognizes limits of faith

This is a great speech by Barack Obama on the proper place of religion and faith in public policy. He should get the churchless vote with these sentiments. Obama certainly has mine.

I just wish he'd repeat it now, saying the same things he did in 2006, since he has a much bigger audience as the Democratic presidential candidate.

For the broadband impaired (I'm not aware of a transcript of this video), here's some of what Obama said in the five minutes. These aren't quotes, just a summary of main points.

--This is a nation not only of Christians, but also of Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, many faiths. It's also a nation of unbelievers.

--In the public arena, we need to focus on universal rather than religion-specific values. Values that everyone can understand and accept, no matter a person's variety of belief or unbelief.

--Arguments about public policy have to be based on reason, not faith. Religion doesn't allow for compromise, but in the public sphere compromise is essential.

--People are tired of seeing faith being used as a tool to attack.

I enjoyed the comments on the Pharyngula post containing the video. Steve liked it, but didn't want any compromising on faith.

Pretty good, up until the end, when he says, "they don't want faith to belittle, they don't want faith to divide."

Faith is inherently belittling and divisive. It belittles the intellect of those who subscribe to it -- "don't think, just believe." It divides, because those who subscribe to faith invariably see their subscription as a virtue, and thus, those who don't subscribe, as lacking that virtue.

Faith sucks completely and utterly and is without a single redeeming feature.

But to hope for a politician to say as much, and remain a viable politician, is to hope for too much, too soon.

So, good enough, and far better than what we've had recently.

For sure. Probably he's referring to Bush, but here's John McCain blathering on about the United States being established as a Christian nation.

I'm praying that he loses. Big time.

I’m so proud of Oregon

Way to go, Obama-loving churchless Oregonians.

Curse the National Day of Prayer

Here on the West Coast there's still a few hours left to take part in the National Day of Prayer (May 1). My recommendation: swear at it.

That's the tack one of my favorite web sites, Pharyngula, took. In the midst of a post on this ridiculous religious observance I found a well-spoken pithy piece of advice. "Fuck the National Day of Prayer."

Now, that might seem a bit harsh. What's wrong with warm fuzzy prayer?

Well, nothing. So long as you're into having one-sided conversations with imaginary people. But a few minutes of browsing the official web site of the National Day of Prayer revealed its dark side – just as I expected.

For one thing, this "national" prayer effort leaves out much of the nation. Namely, anyone who doesn't believe in the Judeo-Christian God.

The web site explains why Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, and other heathens aren't welcome under the not-so-inclusive National Day of Prayer tent:

The National Day of Prayer Task Force was a creation of the National Prayer Committee for the expressed purpose of organizing and promoting prayer observances conforming to a Judeo-Christian system of values… The Task Force represents a Judeo Christian expression of the national observance, based on our understanding that this country was birthed in prayer and in reverence for the God of the Bible.

Right at the top of the home page you can see in some Flash video what the National Day of Prayer really is all about: politics.

I'm told that prayer is America's strength and shield. Gosh, who knew? I thought it was the Constitution, which calls for the separation of church and state.

But, no, it's prayer. And what should we pray for? What a silly question. Election Day. This gets the primo position on the National Day of Prayer web site.

Not world peace, reducing poverty, alleviating disease, helping the hungry, bringing people together. Election Day.

Again, silly me. I didn't realize that Election Day needed praying for. I didn't even know that it had problems requiring God's intervention. Won't Election Day take care of itself this November?

Apparently not.

I dutifully watched the video on the election page. It was mercifully short. I learned that red is the color of America. Funny. The flag is red, white, and blue. But the video only mentions red as representing American values.

Oh, I get it!

Red states and blue states. Republican and Democrat. Vote red/Republican. So the National Day of Prayer not only is limited to Jews and Christians, it looks like Independents and Democrats also aren't part of God's prayer family.

Who clearly are focused on just on a few political issues.

I clicked on a National Day of Prayer link that led me to a helpful Voter's Guide. This will tell me what I should ask God to make happen on Election Day.

Wow, what a non-surprise! Neither Clinton nor Obama gets a "yes" on any of the issues I'm supposed to care about. but a guy in red, John McCain, scores five out of seven (Huckabee, bless his soul, was all "yes").

Human Life Amendment
Traditional Marriage
Gun Rights
Business Freedom
Limit Taxes
Opposes Gay Pride
Iraq War
Moral Education

These are the things to pray for, the Judeo-Christian values that make our country great. Killing. Hatred. Discrimination. Ignorance.

So it's a no-brainer for me to decide what to do on the National Day of Prayer: tell it to go to hell.

Bitterness and religion: some advice for Obama

I've been doing some thinking, from my churchless perspective, about the controversy over Barack Obama's remark that people in struggling Pennsylvania towns are bitter and cling to religion (among other things).

And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

Clinton has seized on the words "bitter" and "cling" in blasting Obama for his supposed elitism. On cable news today I kept seeing her new ad being played.

In the ad a Pennsylvania woman says that she doesn't cling to her faith out of frustration and bitterness; she finds it very uplifting.

Well, maybe that's true. If so, she's rare.

How many people are drawn to religion purely out of positive motivations, not because they're looking for solace, salvation, or some sweetness that life hasn't been giving them?

Very few, I'd say.

Buddhism teaches that life is suffering. So does country music. Where do you turn when your woman has left you, your dog has run away, and your pickup's been repossessed?

Beer – that's one option. Or, religion. "Jesus has a plan for me." That thought takes some of the sting out of a sucky situation.

Here's my advice for Obama: use this controversy as an opportunity to start a dialogue about religion, just as he did with the topic of race after Rev. Jeremiah Wright's comments set off a firestorm.

In his race speech, Obama painted the subject with a pleasing shade of gray. He talked about religion also, but didn't address why people are so attracted to religious belief. This is a sensitive subject. But it needs to be brought out into the open.

There's nothing wrong with someone clinging to religion because it makes him or her feel better. I've done that myself – for a long time.

I've never been conventionally religious, but when times were tough, I found myself praying in my own non-Christian fashion. When my mother had a major stroke, before I could get on a plane to see her I pleaded with Whoever is in charge of such things to give her whatever good karma I had.

Ditto when I feared that my wife had a serious health problem. My faithlessness temporarily turned into faith as I asked for some sort of divine intervention. I knew I was almost certainly talking to myself, but I was drawn to do the asking anyway.

If Obama would speak honestly about this, it would resonate with most believers. Something like…

"I realize that when I said people cling to religion to explain their frustrations, that rubbed some the wrong way. They feel that their faith springs from love, from devotion, from a desire to serve God – positive motivations.

Sometimes this is true. However, religious belief also helps us cope with pain, suffering, disease, death, unemployment, poverty – the negative side of life. When we're looking for answers, for reasons, and none are forthcoming, it's natural to find solace in our faith.

Life is tough. Some people get through it without religion. They're sustained by something else. But we all need support from somewhere when what we thought we could count on, no longer does.

I'm not ashamed to say that I've clung to my faith in those times. And neither should anyone else, including the Pennsylvanians I've been talking to these past weeks."

Understand, I'm not going soft on churchlessness. To me, it's preferable to see problems as they are in their naked reality, without viewing them through a prism of religious belief.

Losing one's job can be just that – a stint on unemployment and little cash in the wallet. It doesn't have to be suffused with divine meaning ("God is teaching me a lesson.")

However, if someone feels better by framing their problems within a religious belief structure, that's fine. Feeling good doesn't need any justification. Like I said before, it's when we say "I'm right" rather than "I like" that problems arise.

Along that line, I like that a recent poll is showing that Obama is actually gaining ground over Clinton in Pennsylvania and Indiana. This seems to show that voters aren't upset with Obama's "clinging to religion out of bitterness" remarks.

Probably, because they realize what he said is true.