Author: Don

May 5th was the anniversary of the day in 1925 when John Scopes was charged with the hideous crime of teaching evolution to schoolchildren. Today, 83 years after the event that culminated in the Scopes Trial, we’ve come a long way; evolution is now part of the science curriculum in every US public school. Still, there are many who would take us back to those days, banning scientific theory in favor of mythological studies of the nature of life. Many creationists and their less honest “Intelligent Design” brethren (who hide creationism behind a politically correct facade) would happily greet a return to the era when an educator could be arrested for presenting course material which had no biblical basis. The leaders of this movement have deep pockets, numerous followers, tremendous political power, and the support of much of the right-wing punditry in America. They’re well organized, through groups like the Discovery Institute, and they’ve got the wherewithal to produce major motion pictures based around their propaganda. They’re a legion of quote-miners and defiers of logic, they’re relentless, and they only need one judge in one state who supports their tactics at the right moment to start us on that slippery slope that leads us downhill toward theocracy.

Fortunately, we have one great defense against this encroachment of faerie tales into science: observable reality is on our side.

Ironically, this close to the anniversary of Scopes’ arrest, another teacher was fired this week for an alleged offense against all that is holy. Jim Piculas, a frequent substitute teacher in Pasco County, Florida, lost his job because a sleight-of-hand magic trick he did in front of students was deemed to be the practice of wizardry. The district has said in its defense that there were other performance issues involved in the dismissal, but if that was the case, why bring up Piculas’ diabolical spell-casting at all?

The Evangelical Manifesto released this week by a group of conservative Christian leaders purports to be a call to “find a new understanding of our place in public life”, but a quick read through it hints that the “new understanding” is pretty much the same as the “old understanding”. Evolution is wrong, gays are bad, et cetera.

The statement, called “An Evangelical Manifesto,” condemns Christians on the right and left for using faith to express political views

Hey, maybe we are making some progress after all!

without regard to the truth of the Bible

Then again, maybe not.

The writers do seem to have some understanding of what has happened to their movement, though:

“[…] Christians become ‘useful idiots’ for one political party or another, and the Christian faith becomes an ideology,” according to the draft.

Could recognizing one’s own useful idiocy be a first step toward recovery?

Face it, evangelicals, maybe your efforts aren’t bearing the fruit you’d wish them to because your creeds are at best shortsighted and bigoted, very often dishonest, and yes, at times downright crazy.

Lastly we turn to this week’s litany of sex crimes and murders brought to us courtesy of the various Sky-Daddies and their most ardent followers.

The Messiah himself (at least according what Wayne Bent, AKA Michael Travesser, proclaimed about himself in 2000) was arrested on multiple charges of sex with minors. A former member of Bent’s The Lord Our Righteousness Church said Bent had told him to have sex with seven virgins, including two of his own teenage daughters.

But for the last and sickest godcrime this week, we turn to Islam, the good old Religion of Peace. A Pakistani woman named Rukhma was brought across the border into American-made Free Afghanistan in recent months. While there she was able to enjoy the freedom to be raped and the freedom to watch her rapist beat her three year old son to death. Charges were filed, though, and the man was sentenced to 20 years in prison. That means Rukhma will be released from her own prison cell, where she’ll spend four years for committing adultery in allowing herself to be raped, sixteen years before her assailant is released.

The chief prosecutor of eastern Nangarhar province, who oversaw Rukhma’s case, suggested she got off lightly.

“If my wife goes to the bazaar without my permission, I will kill her. This is our culture,” Abdul Qayum shouted scornfully.

His colleagues laughed approvingly. “This is Afghanistan, not America,” Mr Qayum said.

Aaah, sometimes it’s heartening to be reminded just what it is we’re fighting for over there.

EDIT: Almost forgot! Great writeup on Alternet this week by an atheist who attended a fundamentalist religious retreat undercover.

Let me be the latest to offer encouragement to the Tennessee Christian student who made the news for refusing to say the Pledge of Allegiance and the Quaker who refused to sign a loyalty oath for a teaching job in California.

Yes, that’s right: I’m taking the side of the theists on this one.

Of course I think their reasons for their defiance are misguided; of course I think they’re just allowing one form of blind fealty to supersede another. But motives aside, they are in the right on this one.

Requiring any citizen for any reason to swear any sort of fealty oath is antithetic to the very freedom and democracy we claim to be spreading through the world at gunpoint. (Note please that I am not speaking of oaths to uphold the law and Constitution, which are perfectly reasonable to ask of public officials, police officers, etc – just so long as it’s done with the explicit restatement of the citizens’ rights under those very laws to protest them and effect changes.) The Pledge and its more sinister potentially legally-binding, signed-document cousins are traditions born of jingoism and paranoia that, like religion, encourage an abandonment of reason in service to some higher power. They promote the kind of mentality that turns us into a nation of Stadium Patriots, rowdy fans who support the home team with cries of “Go USA! We’re number one!” while swilling enough watered-down beer to keep from noticing that this game isn’t going so well. In fact, the last couple of seasons have been lousy, and maybe there needs to be a shake-up in the management team, but hey, what really matters is that the franchise has a lot of world championships under its belt and things will get better if we just keep cheering and buying more red-white-and-blue pompoms and team logo hats and bumper stickers and maybe some bobble-head dolls of our favorite players. Somebody speaks up and says the home team needs to make some changes? “Why does he hate the home team? T’row da bum out!”

I wouldn’t shed a tear if the brainwashing mantra that is our Pledge of Allegiance was never pushed on another public school student again. If educators really feel the need to have kids recite some short text every morning, I would suggest something less loaded with words of blind-faith fealty and more encouraging of actual thought. While I’m sorely tempted to call it “The Pledge to Pay a Little Fucking Attention Once in a While”, I’m not sure we as a nation are ready to accept “fucking” as a kindergarten vocabulary word; I’m certainly not. No, instead, let’s call it a Pledge of Reflection or a Pledge of Observation or a Pledge of Understanding, and it would go something like this:

I pledge to observe the world around me and try to understand it, never dismissing the unknown as not worth knowing.
I pledge to try to understand that the world is a very small place and we all must share it, never dismissing another’s troubles simply because they aren’t mine.
I reaffirm my rights of freedom of speech, assembly, and religion, and my equality under the law, and I recognize that those very rights are my greatest tools for their own preservation.

Yeah, it’s a far-from-perfect start, but it does the job of encouraging Paying a Little Fucking Attention Once in a While. It’s non-partisan, shows no particular favor toward any religion or school of philosophy, and, in short, is already better than what we’ve got. I think it would be an interesting exercise to present this basic idea to the blogosphere and see what others could come up with.

Now that I’m actively collecting odd and/or disturbing news stories about the religiously inclined, I find myself in the position of having so much material to write about that I don’t know where to start, or how to condense it all into a blog entry that won’t run on for too many pages.

Let’s warm up with links to the story about the priest who disappeared while flying under party balloon power and the story of the priest in Russia who was tricked into blessing a strip club. Then of course there’s the tale of magical penis theft from Brazil and the conference where Muslims are trying to push the idea of moving the international date line to Mecca. Best quote from that particular farce:

In a clear support for the call, Islamic scholar Yousuf al-Qaradawi said Islam, “unlike other religions, never contradicted science”.

Since “Jedi” is apparently now a religion as well, I can even include the story about the drunken Darth Vader’s arrest on assault charges.

Now on to the fundies’ favorite subject to try not to think about – or at least, to try to hide from everyone else how much they’re thinking about it: sex.

I’ve written once or twice here about the Bush administration’s abstinence-only sex education program, and it’s been back in the news again lately. House democrats convened a panel this week to discuss the elimination of this program, and were told of its many shortcomings by members of the American Public Health Association, the American Psychological Association, and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. This was not enough for at least one republican in the room, though:

Rep. John Duncan, a Tennessee Republican, said that it seems “rather elitist” that people with academic degrees in health think they know better than parents what type of sex education is appropriate. “I don’t think it’s something we should abandon,” he said of abstinence-only funding.

I suppose that if parents truly believe that institutionalized ignorance is the solution to the problems of teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted disease, they should be allowed to opt their children out of real sex ed classes, but I don’t want my tax dollars spent to support an anti-educational agenda.

LaVern Jordan, founder of the Parkway Christian School in Texas, knows a little about sex. Or, at the very least, he’s eager to find out about it – so eager, in fact, that it seems he solicited sex from a student’s mother in lieu of tuition fees, and was caught on tape doing it. Sadly, the comments on this YouTube video are full of Christians screaming that he’s being persecuted for being a Christian.

Speaking of persecution of Christians: Mount Vernon, Ohio middle school teacher John Freshwater made the news over claims his first amendment rights were being violated when administrators told him to remove all religious items from his classroom; these included a bible on his desk and a copy of the ten commandments on the classroom door. A large group of student supporters responded by bringing bibles in to sit on their desks during class, and a rally was held in his honor.

I don’t really have a problem with someone sitting a bible on his desk in a school setting, so long as that bible in no way becomes part of the curriculum he’s teaching. So I fully support him unless, of course, there’s more the story. For instance, I’d have a problem if he were to promote creationIDsm in class by, I dunno, including anti-evolution propaganda pamphlets in the course material or doing something totally goofy like throwing a bunch of Legos on the floor and asking the students how they could possibly randomly assembled themselves. I mean, really, the way this guy is being harassed for his faith, you’d think he’d done something totally inappropriate like, just to make up some random, cruel example, using an electrical device to burn crosses into his students’ flesh.

The fax stated, “We are religious people, but we were offended when Mr. Freshwater burned a cross onto the arm of our child. This was done in science class in December 2007, where an electric shock machine was used to burn our child. The burn was severe enough that our child awoke that night with severe pain, and the cross remained there for several weeks. … We have tried to keep this a private matter and hesitate to tell the whole story to the media for fear that we will be retaliated against.”

Oh, what will those poor, harried Christians be persecuted for next?

For people who are so afraid of death that they need to pretend it’s only a temporary state, the religious sure are in a hurry to send other people to theirs early. Another child, this time a fifteen month old, has died because her parents wouldn’t seek medical attention for conditions that are easily treatable by antibiotics. One imagines those same parents would have no problem marching in a rally shouting, “abortion is murder!”, but neglect of the living is just fine as long as it’s done in God’s name.

Christianity has no monopoly on the death-for-God notion, though. In fact for the most part they’re not very good at it. The BBC this week published an article about the imposition of the death penalty under Islam for people who leave the faith, and the London Times ran a story about a gay Iranian whose partner was executed for his sexual orientation and who now fears for his life because the Dutch government denied him the political asylum he requested to help avoid a similar fate himself.

I’m guessing the gay marriage thing is still off a little in the future for the middle east.

The folks behind Expelled are still in defensive mode this week, screaming all the while of course that those who claim they’ve plagiarized from both educational sources and PBS are simply trying to silence them because they’re speaking out against the dogma that is evolution. Apparently Yoko Ono and the band The Killers have also had their copyrights violated. I suppose it’s not enough to interview scientists under false pretenses to promote a nonsense non-theory in a movie peppered with images of the Third Reich; no, when you’re lying for Jesus, it’s best o go all-out.

(By the way, the link to Expelled above actually goes to the Expelled Exposed website, because links to this counter-site will help to raise its ranking in search engine results for the term Expelled.)

James Dobson’s American Family Association is trying to get Marriot hotels to drop the portion of their in-room pay-per-view movie service that includes adult fare. One would assume their thinly veiled boycott threat does not apply to depictions of the biblically mandated act of lesbian love.

The right-wing punditry over at Townhall.com are a wonderful source of stupidity to draw upon; even on otherwise quiet weeks I’m sure I’ll have no trouble finding some perverse statement over there to ponder in this series of posts.

This week’s Townhall Special Friends are Michael “War on Penguins” Medved and our old buddy, Dinesh Confuz’da.

Medved points out rightly that at no time in the foreseeable future will an atheist be elected president in this country. Well… duh. He seems to think an atheist wouldn’t be cut out for the job, though. Says the Penguiphobe:

As Constitutional scholars all point out, the Presidency uniquely combines the two functions of head of government (like the British Prime Minister) and head of state (like the Queen of England). POTUS not only appoints cabinet members and shapes foreign policy and delivers addresses to Congress, but also presides over solemn and ceremonial occasions.

…

For instance, try to imagine an atheist president issuing the annual Thanksgiving proclamation. To whom would he extend thanks in the name of his grateful nation –-the Indians in Massachusetts?

I suppose he could thank the Indians, but I imagine some of them might be just a tad bitter about the destruction of their civilization by those loving Christian settlers. A better choice might be the farmers who grew or raised the food folks around the nation are about to devour, or to the folks throughout history who have made the agricultural advances that allow us to live in such abundance. How about thanking the framers of the constitution, who had the forethought to create a secular nation where people are free to celebrate the Thanksgiving tradition (or not to) according to their own customs? How about thanks to the men and women who have died over the years fighting to preserve the rights laid out in that document? Any of these seem more profound and meaningful to me than a simple “Praise Jesus!”

Then there’s the significant matter of the Pledge of Allegiance. Would President Atheist pronounce the controversial words “under God”? … Moreover, what patriotic songs would our non-believer chief executive authorize for major celebrations and observances? “God Bless America” is out, obviously, as is “America the Beautiful” (with its chorus, “America, America, God Shed His Grace on Thee.”) “My Country ‘tis of Thee” features an altogether unacceptable last verse (“Our father’s God to thee/Author of Liberty/To Thee we sing…”) and “The Star Spangled Banner” national anthem also concludes with a verse that could cause hives to the ACLU (“Then conquer we must when our cause it is just/And this be our motto: In God is Our Trust.”)

Does Medved really think the ability to sing patriotic songs is an important qualification for a presidential candidate? Does he think it’s impossible to appreciate the intention of a song without picking it apart line by line? (I mean, really, what would have become of Everybody Wang Chung Tonight if people had delved too far into the meaning of the lyrics?) Does he cling to the mistaken idea that the “under God” in the pledge of allegiance was anything but an overreaction to the Red Scare?

The notion of dropping or altering all references to God and faith on public occasions to avoid discomfort for a single individual amounts to a formula for a disastrously unpopular presidency.

A better formula for a disastrously unpopular presidency would be one where the nation is successfully attacked by terrorists, plunged into an unjustified, poorly executed war, spied on by its government, implicated in torture, its currency devalued, its economy in freefall. Good thing people like Medved are around to convince voters to opt for at least another four years of the McSame.

There’s a difference between an atheist, however, and a Mormon or a Jew – despite the fact that the same U.S. population (about five million) claims membership in each of the three groups. For Mitt and Joe, their religious affiliation reflected their heritage and demonstrated their preference for a faith tradition differing from larger Christian denominations. But embrace of Jewish or Mormon practices doesn’t show contempt for the Protestant or Catholic faith of the majority, but affirmation of atheism does.

Unfortunately most of America subscribes to this theory – believing in any fairy tale is better than believing in none.

Atheism itself shows contempt for no one; contempt for unreasoning beliefs, perhaps, but not necessarily for the people who embrace them. I certainly can’t speak for all atheists, but personally I strongly support your right to believe what you want – but I won’t join you in the beliefs themselves, nor in your presumed right to push them or their consequences onto everyone else.

Winning the War on Islamo-Nazism.

What the hell is Islamo-Nazism? Has our national dialogue been so dumbed down that we can justify anything by claiming that damned Osama bin Hitler will win if we don’t all line up to support the republican party line?

Our enemies insist that God plays the central role in the current war and that they affirm and defend him, while we reject and ignore him. The proper response to such assertions involves the citation of our religious traditions and commitments, and the credible argument that embrace of modernity, tolerance and democracy need not lead to godless materialism.

Yes, because those Islamo-Nazis will rush to embrace us if we all take up Christianity or Judaism.

The charge that our battle amounts to a “war against Islam” seems more persuasive when an openly identified non-believer leads our side—after all, President Atheist says he believes in nothing, so it’s easy to assume that he leads a war against belief itself. A conventional adherent of Judeo-Christian faith can, on the other hand, make the case that our fight constitutes of an effort to defend our own way of life, not a war to suppress some alternative – and that way of life includes a specific sort of free-wheeling, open-minded religiosity that has blessed this nation and could also bless the nations of the Middle East.

There again is the assumption that a lack of belief in the supernatural amounts to a desire for the systematic suppression of religion. While there are probably more than a few atheists who wouldn’t be bothered by such actions (just as there are some religious folks who have openly called for atheists to have stamps on their foreheads to identify them as less than human), the vast majority of US atheists I’ve encountered simply want to be able to live here without feeling the need to hide that fact that they don’t subscribe to any particular mythology.

And now we come to the latest screed by Dinesh, He-Whose-Name-Is-So-Easy-To-D’stort-That-I-Can’t-Help-Myself. He begins by whining that evolution is “taught in an atheistic way” in public schools, citing several books and essays containing passages pointing out the fact that the evidence for evolution damages the credibility of religious theories of our origin. One of the books he mentions is, he says, is “widely assigned”, but no data is provided on what level of circulation any of these books have. (To be fair, I’ve not read Mr. D’souza’s latest book, from which he draws these examples, and it’s entirely possible he provides more detailed information there.) I do know that during all my years at public schools in the 70s and 80s, never once was I assigned a textbook that took a specific stance one way or the other on the existence of God. Never once in college (where I spent 11 years, mostly part-time while working to pay for it) was I exposed to any mention, positive or negative, except in philosophy and literature courses where the topic was relevant and where it was addresses in an even-handed way.

But let’s just accept for purposes of this discussion the idea that those biology textbooks are just brimming with great oozing masses of atheistic immorality (and ignore the possibility that they may often simply be perceived that way because evolution itself represents such a strong argument against God).

Law suits, Dinesh says, are just the thing to solve this problem of rampant government-approved non-belief. I disagree: I think the textbook makers should voluntarily pull such authors’ opinions from the books – keeping millions of their and the school districts’ dollars from being handed over to lawyers. Why? Because the act of learning about evolution and the development of the reasoning skills used to understand the theory are far superior tools for breaking free from religion’s grasp than any personal opinion from any scientist could ever hope to be.

Schools would be on notice that they cannot use scientific facts to draw metaphysical conclusions in favor of atheism.

Atheism denies the metaphysical. Scientific facts are used to draw scientific conclusions about atheism. Deal with it.

In this way Darwinism in the public schools would no longer be a threat to religion in general or Christianity in particular.

If by “Darwinism” you mean the theory of evolution and the scientific method attendant to it, then these will always be a threat to religion, because they will always represent a better way to understand the world than “invisible sky-daddy told me so!”