Category: Politics

The cracker controversy goes on. Though PZ Myers has received multiple death threats over his stated intention to desecrate a wafer, it’s apparently the Catholics who fear for their lives – so much so that Bill Donohue and his Catholic League have felt the need to ask for increased security at the upcoming Republican convention to defend them from those “hysterical atheists”. Apparently atheists’ inability to grasp the obviousness of the bread-product-to-sacred-meat transformation is a sign of violent, unpredictable personalities.

It’s absurd, of course, to expect some sort of atheist-vs-catholic pogroms to break out at a political convention. But, really, I have no problem with the idea of beefing up security. In fact, I think every single attendee at that particular gathering should have his or her own dedicated team of highly paid professional bodyguards… because every dollar they spend on paranoia is a dollar they don’t spend on their election campaigns.

I wonder if the domain name “ChristOnACracker.com” is taken? It could become a Jesus-recipe swap site – I’ll post my Broccoli Savior Casserole! I also wonder at what point during the digestive process the transubtantiation happens. If a low carb dieter, for instance, was to toss down a handful of properly blessed Eucharists, would they turn to meat in time to avoid spiking the eater’s blood sugar? And should there be a “Before/After” type nutritional label to go with those things? I mean, how is anybody supposed to know how many grams of protein and fat are in a single serving of Jesus?

Jeremy Hall, a two-tour Iraq veteran, was raised as a baptist. But somewhere along the way, he outgrew the fairy tales of his youth and became an atheist.

That’s where his troubles allegedly began. It seems that many of his comrades-in-arms and the officers he served under didn’t care for his lack of belief.

When Specialist Jeremy Hall held a meeting last July for atheists and freethinkers at Camp Speicher in Iraq, he was excited, he said, to see an officer attending.

But minutes into the talk, the officer, Maj. Freddy J. Welborn, began to berate Specialist Hall and another soldier about atheism, Specialist Hall wrote in a sworn statement. “People like you are not holding up the Constitution and are going against what the founding fathers, who were Christians, wanted for America!” Major Welborn said, according to the statement.

Major Welborn told the soldiers he might bar them from re-enlistment and bring charges against them, according to the statement.

This and other incidents lead Hall to file suit against the army in March for discrimination on lack-of-religious grounds. This is of course not the first recent controversy over religion in the military; the generals who made a commercial in the Pentagon for a Christian group spring to mind, and accusations of evangelists running the show have come out of both West Point and the Air Force Academy. (Though, to be fair, the law suit at the Air Force Academy was thrown out in part because the plaintiffs failed to provide information on any specific instance of discrimination.)

But there are certainly groups within the military who are openly pushing for strength through mythology:

the Officers’ Christian Fellowship, has representatives on nearly all military bases worldwide. Its vision, which is spelled out on the organization’s Web site, reads, “A spiritually transformed military, with ambassadors for Christ in uniform empowered by the Holy Spirit.”

Mike Weinstein, founder of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, says that his organization has heard thousands of complaints from soldiers who feel they’ve had religious beliefs pushed on them from within the structure of the military. Weinstein’s summary of the goals of the OCF and its ilk is chilling:

“Their purpose is to have Christian officers exercise Biblical leadership to raise up a godly army,” he says.

So to every theist out there who uses the phrase “militant atheist” to describe non-believers who speak out about their non-belief, I send this message:

Stop it. For your own good. Because if there is magical deity up there in the sky and he/she/it is as just and fair as you seem to think, there’s likely a lightning bolt headed your way as punishment for the sin of hypocrisy.

A while back I applauded Iowa Senator Charles Grassley for his probe into the finances of several prominent televangelists.

There’s been little other news of this effort because it is proceeding, one would assume, at the usual glacial governmental pace; but this piece of news did come out recently:

Four of the ministers have since complied with the probe, but Rev. Kenneth Copeland, whose congregation recently bought him a $20 million private jet to preach the gospel, is holding out against the inquiry, which he claims is “aimed at publicly questioning the religious beliefs of the targeted churches.”

“It’s not yours, it’s God’s, and you’re not going to get it,” Copeland says of his financial records. He has launched a website to publicize his crusade and has received support from several leading conservatives, including Paul Weyrich and Kenneth Blackwell.

Okay, so it’s God’s money, and therefore the items you bought with it are God’s as well. He must be a really generous guy to keep letting you borrow his stuff.

Now, I’m not going to pretend to know more about this “God” person than the Reverend, who obviously knows him well enough that they travel together. But from what I remember reading about him years ago, I’m pretty convinced of one thing: he doesn’t need a plane to get around.

Ah, well, I suppose we can just say He invests in mysterious ways and move on to some praying and passing of the collection plate.

In speaking to a liberal Christian group in 2006, Obama made the simple point that even among Christians there is hardly agreement on what is the correct interpretation of the Bible:

“Even if we did have only Christians in our midst, if we expelled every non-Christian from the United States of America, whose Christianity would we teach in the schools?” Obama said. “Would we go with James Dobson’s or Al Sharpton’s?”

Apparently Focus On Family’s James Dobson knows for sure what every passage in the Bible is supposed to mean, because on the basis of that speech he’s accused Obama of “distorting the Bible“.

Says Jimmy D (not to be confused with Jimmy Dean, the sausage guy):

“I think he’s deliberately distorting the traditional understanding of the Bible to fit his own worldview, his own confused theology,” Dobson said.

“… He is dragging biblical understanding through the gutter.”

So pointing out that there are many possible meanings to biblical passages and then citing a few examples where there is frequent disagreement is tantamount to deliberate distortion? Or is Jimmy D (not that I have anything against sausage) just throwing a radio-broadcast temper tantrum and shouting “My distortions are better than your distortions!”

Because the larger issue here – and both Dobson and Obama need to have this scribed into some holy book so maybe they’ll start to believe it – is that any interpretation of the Bible as anything other than a collection of fairy tales devised by people who got bored with the old fairy tales is a distortion – a distortion of reality. Lending it any credence beyond what’s due to a mixed-message collection of Aesop’s Fables is a distortion of reason.

So, in conclusion, the best breakfast ever is an omelet with some sage sausage, crumbled up bacon, and the cheese of your choice. Mmmm, that’s good eatin’.

Mark Fiore does some great political cartoons; his latest introduces us to Petrotheism. I wish I’d been the one to come up with that term!

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.”