Kent County, in the middle, is the home of the state capitol, a prominent air force base, and a NASCAR track, with a mixed population of suburbanites, rural folks, and even a few Amish – it makes for a varied cultural mix where you can never make a safe assumption about the political or religious leanings of the guy stuck in traffic on Rt 13 next to you.

And then there’s Sussex. With the exception of a narrow strip of wealthy resort area along the coast where the high gay population has helped drag the place a bit leftward and tone down the religiosity just a little, you could rip Sussex up and drop it someplace in the deep south without many people noticing until they started laughing at the signs for Assawoman. It’s a God-fearin’, pickup-truck-drivin’ region where they listen to both kinds of music. It’s been the site of school prayer controversy in the recent past, and it’s the mystical source of Christine O’Donnell’s eldritch powers.

Today the state’s main newspaper reported on “weighty issues” brought up by a lawsuit filed down there. It seems that for over 40 years the County Council has been opening their meetings by saying the Lord’s Prayer, and a few residents have challenged them on it, claiming it violates church-state separation. No, say its defenders, it’s perfectly okay, because it’s not a Christian prayer.

Really? They’re reciting it at the mosques these days, are they? Widely used to open meetings in the Punjab region of India, is it? The Wiccans have taken it up, have they? (Oh yeah – O’Donnell. I guess you have a point on that last one.)

The simple fix for this, the one that wouldn’t waste any tax dollars on legal battles, would be to replace the opening prayer with a moment of silence during which individuals can beg for the blessings of whichever version of whichever fantasy character they choose. If your faith loses value when you can’t put it on parade, you don’t have a religion, you have a public relations strategy. And I’m pretty sure the Divine Zombie himself left specific instructions not to do it that way.

Ariel will make your children kill you!

Ukpabio’s Liberty Gospel Church is a leading and growing voice in the advocacy of the child-witch-hunting movement in Africa. With branches in Nigeria, South Africa, Ghana, and Cameroon, she and her organization spread the Gospel of Flaming Children through books, sermons, and films, including a movie called “End of The Wicked” which depicts children killing and eating their parents. They’ve been instrumental in whipping up the hysteria that has lead to what UNICEF estimates to be 20,000 children who are homeless in Nigeria alone as a direct result of being cast out by families who believe them to be possessed.  It’s not all bad, though:  if your son’s magic has caused that mole on your chin to grow a little larger but you’re not ready to kick him out of the house or kill him outright, you might be able to find a pastor who, for a small fee, will exorcise the evil spirits by setting fire to the child or pouring acid into one or more orifices. Other options include in-church imprisonment and torture, forced drinking of hallucinogens or poison, and live burial.

This evil warlock confessed his sins before the righteous fire consumed him.

A “Stand Against Helen Ukpabio” page has been created on Facebook to help organize protests against her visit.

At first I wasn’t sure what he was talking about.  Dangers of contraception?  As a pro-sex liberal heathen (e.g. evil) I had trouble understanding this statement until I tried to think about it from a godly, moral (e.g. good) perspective.  Once I shifted my point of view, it all became clear!  So, since everybody seems to like lists these days, I present to you:

Rick Santorum’s Top Five Dangers of Contraception

(If Rick Santorum were me, pretending to be Rick Santorum)

5. Condoms are often lubricated, and for me, the fewer Google searches on “lubricant”, the better.

4. Limited access to birth control means even more abortions to get my base riled up about!  Yay!

3. We need to produce lots of low-wage menial laborers to support the coming free-market utopia, so have more babies!

2. Just because God gave us sexual urges and genitalia doesn’t mean it’s okay to do anything with them.  Wait – maybe he gave them to us as test, and the baby Jesus cries when we have unwed non-reproductive intercourse in unapproved positions.  Or maybe Satan gave us sexual urges, and God just let him get away with it.  Either way, sex is bad.

.. and the number one reason why birth control is a threat to civilization:

1. Letting women choose when or if they get pregnant sets us careening down that slippery slope that ends in a society of uppity, non-submissive females.  Mark my words – if we give these bitches the pill, next thing you know they’ll be wanting rights and careers and equality!  As President I, Rick Santorum, will not stand idly in the face of such obscenities.

Before I took off my Santorum hat, just to be thorough, I tried to think of arguments from within the Conservaverse for contraception, and while I only came up with one, it’s a doozy.  It just might be enough to override one through five above!

Rick Santorum’s Top Reason For Contraception

(If Rick Santorum were me, etc.)

1.  Sometimes babies grow up to be gay.

The really disturbing thing about all this is, of course, the image conjured up by the phrase “Santorum Hat”.

Yesterday I posted my first article there about atheism.  I don’t know if it will even get noticed, but I’m curious what the reaction there will be if it does.  A number of the IB regulars have openly expressed strong religious leanings, so it will be interesting to see what kind of reactions I get.  It’s nothing that should be too controversial – just a brief discussion of the misconception that atheists think the divine has been disproved, and an overview of the “Dawkins scale” of disbelief – but often it doesn’t take much to get people riled up.

'Tis the Season

This is all part-and-parcel of the annual “War On Christmas” meme that’s blasted from countless media outlets every year starting just a few weeks before the traditional bombardment of Christmas music and store Christmas displays gets underway.  (That puts it, I’m thinking, sometime in mid-September at this point.)  It seems that the War On Christmas is now being fought with a sinister biological agent, though – one which spreads highly contagious Christian Persecution Syndrome among believers who encounter those already infected.  Because each holiday season, it seems to me, there are more controversies centered around church/state separation issues, and nearly always these stories are framed as incidents of whiny non-believers attacking the rights of Christians.

Often these controversies occur simply because Christians are denied, for one reason or another, the exclusivity or near-exclusivity to which they’re accustomed.  A prime example this year was the Christmas display in Santa Monica, California, where atheist groups won all but two of the spots in an annual Christmas display lottery through the simple expedient of having submitted more entries.  It’s unfair to be suppressed based on a numerical advantage, say believers there, who next year when most or all of the displays are again nativity scenes will brag about their victory over the heathen because of their numerical advantage.

from Rock Beyond Belief

But sometimes it’s about the rights of atheists to put up any display at all, and these times are why it’s critical that every potential violation of church-state separation is challenged.  The Rock Beyond Belief blog has chronicled the attempts to add a non-religious display to a series of religious ones at Travis Air Force Base.  It was denied before complaints got it approved, censored before complaints got it uncensored, dimly lit until complaints got it lit up (along with the Jewish and other displays), and vandalized multiple times.

These battles aren’t just limited to holiday season arguments over Christmas displays, of course.  There’s also the annual “National Day of Prayer” where groups try to prevent the use of our tax dollars to pay for a state-sponsored prayer event, or Rick Perry’s local Texas rain dance day of prayer for rain (which seems to have caused his state to catch fire, as Bill Maher pointed out – though luckily God finally got around to sending some drought-easing rainfall the same weekend the big atheist convention came to town).  There’s the Camp Pendleton Cross and there’s the Tennessee mayor who called the Freedom From Religion Foundation terrorists for expressing opposition to a town-sponsored cross mounted atop a water tower.

All of these cases have two things in common:

• Each of them involve government funding and/or use of government land in what is perceived by the atheist groups involved to be a violation of First Amendment rights through the exclusion or limitation of expression of some religious viewpoints in relation to others.
• Each of them has been portrayed as a further attempt to unjustly persecute the Christian majority.

What I haven’t seen, though, is any instance of real censorship or persecution here in the US, by which I mean removal of rights outside the sphere of Separation.  Where are the attempts to silence Christian speech, privately or publicly, outside the purview of fighting perceived government endorsement of said speech?  Note that I’m not claiming this never happens; atheists can be overzealous and just plain wrong sometimes, just like anybody else.  There probably are real examples out there.  I just haven’t seen them, and haven’t the patience to Google “Christian persecution” and wade through the results.

I thought I’d maybe caught an example earlier this year when I read about the military cemetery that allegedly was prohibiting non-pre-approved prayer at soldiers’ funerals – it sounded suspicious, but I was willing to entertain the possibility that some anal-retentive bureaucrat somewhere was trying to implement an overzealous interpretation of the rules.  Of course, when the facts of the story were presented outside the evangelical echo chamber, it turned out that what really happened was that a group was showing up uninvited at soldiers’ funerals to utter Christian prayers whether the families wanted them or not, and they were told to knock it the hell off already.  If Odin worshipers got chased away from a funeral procession for singing a dirge to open the gates of Valhalla for a fallen warrior, the controversy would be centered around why the government failed to block their entrance to the facilities in the first place.

So what I’m trying to get at, in a long-winded and roundabout way, is this:  I’d like to find some of the real examples of atheists trying to erect barriers to the free expression of religion where there is not a church-state separation issue.  So please, if you’re actually reading this and not a search engine process or a viagra-selling spambot from a .RU domain:  if you know of a real instance of persecution against Christians by atheists or government institutions, add a comment below with a supporting link or two.  I ask this because I truly believe that everyone should have the right to subscribe to whatever theology they want (no matter how wrong or silly it is), and because I believe that the atheist community is best served when it’s willing to call out its own and say, “Hey, I think you’re doing it wrong.”

A few handy notes for CPS sufferers who might take up this challenge:

• When I say “not a church-state separation issue” I mean that there is no argument to be made that public lands, public facilities, or public funding are being used to promote a religious stance.  Stopping official organized prayer in a public school is, by my definition, acceptable.  Stopping individuals from saying private prayers on school grounds is not.
• Disagreement with the tenants of your religion is not censorship.  “I don’t think so” is not going to harm anything but your ego.

Alright, you’ve got your marching orders.  Now go forth, and find me some persecution!

I disagreed with Hitch on a variety of issues – his support for the Iraq war, for instance – but even where I thought he was wrong I admired his wit and eloquence in arguing his points.  Even when he was debating with an unlit cigarette in his hand, clearly thinking about his next nicotine fix, or he was oozing Johny Walker out every pore, he was an intellectual powerhouse.  His willingness to tackle taboo issues should make his career a case study at journalism schools.  He took on MotherTheresa, Gandhi, and religion in general fervently and fearlessly.

The man who famously said of Jerry Falwell that “if they gave the corpse an enema they could bury him in a matchbox” will no doubt be on the receiving end of faux sadness from some of his detractors (“it’s a shame he’s in hell now”) and exuberance from the “Yay, God of Love, for making the infidel suffer for all eternity” crowd.

Hitch may be gone, but the Hitchslap lives on.

I know, I shouldn’t be harping on your grammar, Bill.  It’s impolite to nitpick. especially when someone is expressing such heartfelt concern for my well-being:

If we hurry, these closeted Christians can celebrate Christmas like the rest of us. As an added bonus, they will no longer be looked upon as people who “believe in nothing, stand for nothing and are good for nothing.”

I really appreciate the offer, Bill. So much that I’m going to use the contact form on your site to volunteer to be an adoptee. But I won’t stop there – I’m going to tell all my heathen friends about your program so they can take advantage of it too!  After all, there are lots of us who aren’t members of American Atheists, the organization you’re targeting, who might miss out if somebody doesn’t let them know about this opportunity!

So I’ve just submitted the following request:

For some reason it didn’t like my response to the verification question at the bottom, so I gave a secular answer, and it worked.  You might want to fix that, Bill.

(I’m not sure if my submission worked – the site just reverted to the same page with an empty form.  Maybe Jesus told their server to reject me?)

Craig’s been on a bit of a losing streak recently – and ironically he’s been losing to people who aren’t there, while arguing for the existence of something that isn’t there.

Yes, for a mere $49.95, you can wrap in the flag and carry the cross, but still unload your AK-47 on those crazy godless liberal commies who seem to think Exxon-Mobil should pay taxes!  Introducing:  The Cross Spangled Banner!

On the occasion of Craig’s planned visit to Oxford last month, the rhetoric was stepped up.  Craig promised to leave an empty chair at his appearance as a reminder of Dawkins’ absence (and possibly to provide a phantom opponent to declare victory against); Dawkins took the time to issue a rare reply to Craig in the form of an article published in The Guardian.

For some years now, Craig has been increasingly importunate in his efforts to cajole, harass or defame me into a debate with him. I have consistently refused, in the spirit, if not the letter, of a famous retort by the then president of the Royal Society: “That would look great on your CV, not so good on mine”.

He then goes on to describe Craig’s recent defenses of biblical slaughter and genocide, and asks,

Would you shake hands with a man who could write stuff like that? Would you share a platform with him? I wouldn’t, and I won’t. Even if I were not engaged to be in London on the day in question, I would be proud to leave that chair in Oxford eloquently empty.

Craig, not surprisingly, went ahead with his attempt to capitalize on Richard’s name and absence.  A few reports on the event have now been published, and it turns out the issue was raised there:

[Craig said] “I would say that God has the right to give and take life as he sees fit. Children die all the time! If you believe in the salvation, as I do, of children, who die, what that meant is that the death of these children meant their salvation. People look at this [genocide] and think life ends at the grave but in fact this was the salvation of these children, who were far better dead…than being raised in this Canaanite culture. “

One attendee, who wished not be named, called Craig’s argument “alarming”: “I’m a Christian who generally agrees with Craig’s ideas but what he said for the last question was simply disturbing. He completely contradicted himself, one minute saying that, effectively, no children were killed in the genocide, only to say later on that it was OK that children died, that it was God’s will, and that they were saved from a debauched culture.”

Sounds to me like the chair was the clear winner of this debate.