Category: Atheism and Religion

Six Nigerian churches were destroyed in May to protest the recovery by police of two Christian girls who were kidnapped by Muslims to marry them off to Muslim men in an attempt to breed more Muslims. To believe that either the kidnapping or the follow-up actions are in any way justified is of course ridiculous and outrageous, and only in a society dominated by ridiculous and outrageous beliefs would anyone even try. It’s a good thing the Christians that are so dominant here in the USA never, ever stoop to such evil tactics as turning children into breeding stock.

The Iraqi woman who fled her home after her husband and sons beat her daughter to death has been gunned down, likely as punishment for not finding her husband’s actions acceptable. Sadly, this will probably be the terrible end of a horrible story, because the odds are against the perpetrators of these crimes ever facing any sort of justice. Maybe we could hook the murdering father up with the Georgia woman who killed her husband because Jesus told her to.

Are you a True Christian? Not if your politics aren’t right, says at least one evangelical organization. You know, if these people can’t even figure out what it takes to be real member of their gang, why should anyone trust them on the whole “existence of God” thing?

This entry would of course be more accurately labeled “The Past Two Weeks in Fundamentalism”, but the standard title is clunky enough as it is.

A California Ford dealership became embroiled in controversy this month over a radio ad it ran:

“Did you know that there are people in this country who want prayer out of schools, “Under God” out of the Pledge, and “In God We Trust” to be taken off our money?

“But did you know that 86 percent of Americans say they believe in God? Now, since we all know that 86 out of every 100 of us are Christians who believe in God, we at Kieffe and Sons Ford wonder why we don’t just tell the other 14 percent to sit down and shut up.

“I guess maybe I just offended 14 percent of the people who are listening to this message. Well, if that is the case, then I say that’s tough; this is America, folks — it’s called free speech. And none of us at Kieffe and Sons Ford are afraid to speak up. Kieffe and Sons Ford on Sierra Highway in Mojave and Rosamond: if we don’t see you today, by the grace of God, we’ll be here tomorrow.”

The dealership has since issued an apology for the ad, the owner claiming he didn’t remember approving it. Does he normally just pay a fee to an advertising agency and tell them “do whatever you want”? He goes on to say that “We’re obviously sorry that it offends a given segment who identifies themselves as atheist.”

I’m guessing it also offends a number of given segments who identify themselves as members of non-Christian religions, as well as Christians who are sensible enough to see that it’s against their best interest to have this sort of nonsense representing them in the media.

I’d like to see Ford issue some statement at the corporate level about this ad, but so far nothing has been forthcoming.

Marriage has been a big topic of late, with the discussion primarily revolving around the court decision upholding same-sex partnerships in California. The zealots are in an uproar about this, of course, and rightly so – because if Janet Folger of WingNutDaily is correct, gay marriage will lead us to nothing less than… THE END OF THE WORLD (DUM! DUM! DUUUUUM!).

Texas authorities are trying to keep their state from vying with Utah for the title of Polygamy Capitol of the United States; another cult down there is under investigation for the usual allegations of abuse sexual and otherwise, injury to children, etc. The cult’s 73 year old leader is pretty spry for his age:

Although members deny that they practice polygamy, former members say Yisrayl Hawkins has at least two dozen wives — and state records show that he fathered two babies last year with women ages 19 and 22.

The holidays must be hell with all those mothers-in-law around.

Many of the stories posted here about Islam paint a picture of a culture where women are treated as property, bereft of rights and privileges, but this is of course not universally the case. No, in fact, in some Muslim cultures, women are accorded special rights that even the men don’t have. A recent example is the Saudi woman who is divorcing her husband because he dared to look under her veil. It’s heartening to see Saudi women escaping the influence of religious fanaticism.

As always, the poor, persecuted Christians of the world are lovingly and peacefully fighting back against their oppressors. Whether it’s a slashed tire on the car of an educator who assailed them by gluing a Darwin fish to his bumper or the burning to death of witches in Kenya, the battle for a return to Godly morality goes on. Still, the fight ahead will be a long and difficult one; even here in the US, many believers are still unfairly persecuted. Why, just last week, a Baptist megachurch minister was arrested apparently for the crime of being Christian while soliciting sex from a minor on the internet.

That’s all for this round. I’ll sign off with a call to arms directed at my fellow atheists: we’re not working hard enough! A recent survey by Coral Ridge Ministries lists us as tied for 8th place with “Cults and false religions” on their ranking of the greatest dangers to America’s spiritual health.

Eighth? Come on, people – we lost to “Pro-homosexual indoctrination”, fernobodyssakes! And why did the ACLU come in first – haven’t they been known to defend religious people? And aren’t they just a bunch of lawyers, anyway?

We have to do better next year!

The holiday weekend, a busy schedule, and some massive battles in the Ettenmoors kept last week’s This Week from being more than abstractly thought about, so of course there’s a lot of catching up to do. It turns out that a good number of recent news items have dealt with the push to force mythology into our public school science curriculum, so I’ve decided to split what would be a huge This Week column into this post on education and another, later entry that covers some of the other recent nonsense.

There seem to be few limits to the dishonesty to which people will sink in order to have a better chance of cramming God’s Word into America’s should-be-secular public education system. Witness, for instance, the metamorphosis of creationism into intelligent design – same shit, different legal paradigm, or at least that’s what they were hoping. Still, though, Reason has won some high-profile victories such as the Dover, PA legal battle against surrogates of the Discovery Institute and its allies, who failed in yet another attempt to inject magic into the science lesson plan.

We won, right? Aren’t our schools safe now?

Hardly. Apparently delusion and persistence go hand in hand.

One “solution” to combating the evils of Evolution is to simply ignore the courts and go ahead and teach some form of Intelligent Design anyway. Turns out, as one survey suggests, that about one in eight high school biology teachers presents intelligent design as a viable alternative to the scientific theory of evolution. Now I understand that good teachers are hard to find and good science teachers even harder, but belief in holy sorcery over scientific evidence should automatically disqualify you from the job, because obviously you weren’t paying much attention in science class as a student.

Sneaking the bible into schools isn’t enough, though; many fundamentalist sorts won’t be happy until it comes barreling through the front door. Don McLeroy, creationist head of the Texas Board of Education – an organization that through its sheer size has tremendous influence on the nature of textbooks made available to schools all over the country – has used the English curriculum as a warmup before tackling state science standards.

teachers and experts had worked for two and a half to three years on new standards for English. So what did McLeroy do? He ignored all that work entirely, and let “social conservatives” on the board draft a new set overnight.

… and then the conservatives who dominate the school board voted their standards in before anyone outside their little clique even had time to review them. What do you want to bet that their upcoming science curriculum has “King James Edition” stamped on the cover?

Texas, of course, is not alone in experiencing legislative myth creep in its schools. In Tennessee, a “Bible in Schools” bill has passed; while the bill’s claimed intent is to “create a non-sectarian high school course about the Bible and its impact on the world”, what are the odds this will be presented in any sort of objective way? And why single out one particular mythology as deserving of its own, separate treatment, when there are so many others whose influence can be felt worldwide? Where is the “Eddas in School” bill, or the “Works of Homer in School” bill? Why single out the Christian Bible unless the intention is to present it from a biased point of view?

Louisiana is also gearing up to teach Magic Sky Faerie theory at taxpayers’ expense. A bill ironically titled the “Louisiana Science Education Act” has reached the House floor there. If passed, it would introduce Untelligent Design to that state’s classrooms. How far the bill will go remains to be seen, but at least one newspaper has come out against it:

That prospect worries the Baton Rouge Advocate’s editorial board, which wrote (May 21, 2008) that the bill will “provide a full-time living for dozens of lawyers in the American Civil Liberties Union. They will have a field day suing taxpayer-funded schools as groups use Nevers’ language to push Bible-based texts in the schools. That’s unconstitutional, and we can see the taxpayer paying — and paying, and paying — for this policy in the future.”

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.