Here is a short video documentary on the Reason Rally by one of my very favorite podcasters, The Thinking Atheist. Enjoy 
Mar 29, 2012
The Thinking Atheist on the Reason Rally
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Mar 27, 2012
The Reason Rally: No Fair-weather Atheists Here!
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Despite the cool temperatures and intermittent rain, a crowd numbering from 20,000-25,000 gathered on the National Mall to celebrate reason, science, and godlessness. And I was very pleased and proud to be there among them.
My husband and I at the Reason Rally.
It was quite an experience to be at the largest freethought gathering of all time, and I can only imagine what it was like for those who had never come to an atheist gathering. The first time I met another person that I could speak with about atheism, I was thrilled beyond belief. Walking into a room with a few hundred atheists at my first American Atheists convention three years ago was like a dream. But this was an experience beyond all of that.
The speakers were of a variety from scientists and professors like Richard Dawkins and PZ Myers to singers like Shelly Segal and comedians like Eddie Izzard and Tim Minchin. This was a Rally for Reason, but not a dry intellectual unfeeling type of reason. It marks a landmark in a trend I have seen in the atheist movement. We are continuing to move beyond the intellectual halls and into the experience of everyday life. This movement is about reason and intellectualism, but also about community and life and emotion. The life of reason includes all of these things too. This is the “New Atheism.”
Bad Religion rocking the Reason Rally
You can find more information about the Reason Rally, and pictures of the speakers, performers, and massive crowd at ReasonRally.org.
Mar 18, 2012
Atheists in Religious Communities
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American Atheists has had series of billboards in the past year that has been targeted to the members inside of religious communities that do not really believe the things that their religion claims. These billboards usually contain the words “You know it’s a myth” and have caused a media stir wherever AA has erected them. For the most part, these billboards have been targeted to the Christian population of the United States, but now the Muslim and Jewish communities have been explicitly targeted with two new billboards in Arabic and Hebrew.
I have a couple of comments on these. First, I am glad that they did away with all use of ALL CAPS on these. In general, the billboard design is a step up from other billboards that AA has promoted, from a purely aesthetic point of view. My favorite part of these billboards is the phrase “you have a choice.” Not only in Jewish and Muslim communities, but also in many Christian communities, any unbelievers (open or not) in their midst may get the message that they really do not have a choice.
From personal experience, when I was invited back to church after coming out as an atheist I had little doubt that the people in the church (at least some of them) genuinely loved and cared about me. I was not worried that I would be shunned or anything like that, like in the personal stories I have heard from those who were raised in stricter religious environments. However, there was a very strong sense that within the church community I would have to not only keep my mouth shut about what I really thought, but willingly expose myself to constant messages that the way I thought was wrong and evil and sinful. That I was sinful and at least somewhat evil. It was as if the church people were saying to me “We understand if you are having trouble believing, but your disbelief is a bad thing and something you must overcome. At least keep your mouth shut about it and be properly ashamed about your inability to believe.” It was not a message I could live with. I’m not saying that the message was necessarily intended that way, but there was always a strong sense of “we love you and we know what is best for you, even if you don’t agree with our judgment.”
American Atheists has been criticized about these billboards as if being exposed to such a message as “God is a myth” is going to take away all faith and comfort from believers who see it. I would say that if a billboard was enough to take away a person’s faith then that person’s faith was very weak to start with. What seems to be the really offensive thing to the religious is that the atheists are saying that people don’t need God or god, and they don’t need religion to be good people. The religious leaders in particular will rail against this message, as it would make their role insignificant. But when you are the lonely atheist in a religious community, the notion that you have the ability to choose not to go along with the religious message is a powerful idea. That there could be others in your own community who think like you but only fear to speak up is an amazing thought. And the thrill of finding community with others among whom you can speak freely without fear and judgement is the best prize of them all.
For more information on the billboard campaign, visit You know it’s a myth — 2012 Billboards.
Mar 10, 2012
See you at the Reason Rally!
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It is now only two weeks until the Reason Rally, and I am getting excited. At last year’s American Atheist convention, when Dave Silverman first announced the big plans, it seemed like the day would never arrive. One of my favorite things about this rally is that it is a movement rally, not just an event for a single organization. In fact, every major freethought and atheist organization is participating in this event. Given the rocky history among some of the atheist organizations in the past, this really is a big deal. The putting aside of differences and focusing on common goals is vital to show how many of us there really are in favor of the Separation of Church and State and rights for the non-religious. We are no longer scattered to and fro, separated from one another and keeping a low and silent profile to avoid being marked by the prejudices of religious friends, family, and employers. Yes, many people still face that situation, but it is changing. We are coming together and showing our numbers and will no longer tolerate being merely tolerated at the will of a religious majority.
Especially after the record-breaking turnout to the American Atheists convention last year, I am looking forward to seeing how many secular Americans come to the Reason Rally!
For more information on the Reason Rally including speakers, musical acts, and information on ride shares, please visit http://www.ReasonRally.org.
Mar 4, 2012
More on the danger of faith
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I just now found this post though The Atheist Experience blog, and it is so beautiful that I just have to share it. The post is from “Sincerely, Natalie Reed” and is called God Does Not Love Trans People. In this post she discusses the issue within the transgender community regarding religion. Since transgender people have been so victimized by religion, why do so many still cling to it so tightly? This same discussion is also relevant to women, racial minorities, and other groups who have been victimized so often in the name of faith.
Faith is the opposite of skepticism. Faith is “just knowing”. Under ideal circumstances, a person derives their conclusions from observations, facts and thinking things through. If new perspectives, new ideas, new considerations, new arguments, new observations or new facts come along, we adapt the conclusion. Faith asks us instead to work backwards. We have the conclusion already. Thought, perspectives, observations, facts and interpretations are structured to support the conclusion. Facts that contradict it are either denied, or re-interpreted and re-framed until they can fit with the original conclusion. For instance, if the initial conclusion is that God created man and woman, and for a man to don a woman’s clothing is a sin, then suddenly finding yourself trans puts you in conflict with the conclusion your faith states MUST be the case. So instead of reconsidering the initial conclusion, and accepting that maybe the whole God thing isn’t quite right, you either adapt the facts (suppressing your trans identity and attempting to conform) or you re-interpret and contort your perspective until it all fits together somehow. He made you this way because He loves you. He made you this way to test your strength. He made you this way because suffering brings you closer to Him. Etc.
I recommend that you read the entire post. It is long, but worth it.
In particular the stories of transgender people fascinate me, because I was so ingrained with the ideas of binary sexuality (you must be a man or woman, period!). It was even harder for me to drop the cis-sexism than it was to walk away from religion, since the idea is so engrained in all aspects of our culture. It’s an assumption taken on faith that few people even consider the possibility of questioning. It was only though my contact with the feminist movement and through reading the blogs and stories of transgender people that the assumption began to crack. When you do some reading about sex, and the development of sexuality and the development of sexual identity and preferences, it becomes clear that human sexuality exists on a spectrum and is definitely not binary. (I recommend Darrel Ray’s Sex and God: How Religion Distorts Sexuality for more information.)
We need to always question our assumptions and not merely take things on faith. Particular when taking things on faith causes so much suffering for good people.
Mar 3, 2012
Richard Dawkins is good for the Reason Rally
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I have noticed something in the attitudes of atheists and other freethinkers toward religion, that it is strongly influenced by the experiences that person has had with religion in the past. Those with a fundamentalist or evangelical background have experienced the suppression of thought and fear of external ideas that goes with fundamentalist indoctrination, and may have seen families, possibly even their own, torn apart by religious differences. They are more likely to be strongly anti-religious, even if they self-censor at times to keep the peace. In fact, the perceived need for self-censorship leads to a great deal of resentment towards the very thought of religion. Religion as they have experienced it is thought-suppressing, guilt-inducing, fanaticism filled bunk. And they rage against it. Understandably.
On the other hand, those from a more liberal and open religious background seem to not quite understand what these former fundamentalists are all worked up about. Or those who have never been religious, but have had lots of experience with reasonable, accepting religious people who you can tell you are an atheist without them making faces at you like they are going to be sick or faint or go berserk on you. Lucky for them.
Somehow, I get the idea that Barbara J. King is likely to fall into the later description, even though I’m not sure what her background is. She is the author of a recent article on the NPR blog titled “Will Richard Dawkins Drive A Stake Through The Heart Of The ‘Reason Rally’?“
She seems to think that Richard Dawkins’s outspoken criticism of religion is going to somehow work against the goals of the Reason Rally to combat negative stereotypes of atheists. I, probably the same as Richard Dawkins, does not think that the way for us to combat negative ideas of atheism is for the atheists to make ourselves quieter on the subject of religion, as if it were actually superior to be a religionist (of whatever kind) than to be an atheist as so many apparently assume.
From the article:
In a 2006 interview with Steve Paulson at Salon (during his tenure as professor of public understanding of science), Dawkins suggested that greater intelligence is correlated with atheism. He also said that when it encourages belief in the absence of evidence, “there’s something very evil about faith.”
Slam. That noise you hear is the sound of thousands of minds closing down and turning away from anything that Dawkins might go on to say about science.
By choosing words hurtful and harsh, Dawkins closes off a potential channel of communication about science with people who hold faith dear in their lives.
What does she think Dawkins means by faith, I wonder? She makes clear elsewhere in the article that she is a science-minded person herself and just as frustrated as anyone by the antics of the creationists to sell pseudoscientific crap to children. (My words, not hers.) Surely she does not consider it virtuous to believe claims that have not been proven, or that have been shown to be out of step with modern knowledge of the world? Once again, I think, the problem comes down to “tone.” Saying things like “faith is evil” is going to turn off religious people who have a very rosy view of the virtue of believing unquestioningly in things that one has not seen (see John 20:29). Nevermind that the belief in the virtue of such “faith” is exactly what is at the heart of the harm done in the world in the name of religion, from suicide bombers to Catholic parents who believe the word of the religious authority over that of their hurt child. This is the sort of thing that leads Dawkins and others like him to make such “hurtful and harsh” statements about faith. The hurt that has been perpetuated in the name of faith has been much worse.
I think I know where she is coming from. Sure, there are plenty of people out there who consider themselves believers in a religious tradition but are at the same time pro-science, pro-reason people. At the same time, these are the people who use their reason and learning to reject or reinterpret portions of their religious tradition to make it compatible with a rational life in the modern world. Their traditions have been influenced by secular thought in the direction of progress. Surely we should not isolate ourselves from those who follow the nicer parts of religious tradition and still hold common cause with us secular people.
On the other hand, we are not going to improve the cause of secularism and acceptance of atheists by muzzling the atheist’s criticism of religion. That does not lead to any progress at all, in fact, that just keeps us where we are right now. We will never have an equal place for atheists in society until we get rid of the fear of blasphemy and offense of the religious and lay out all these ideas on the table for open discussion.
Richard Dawkins has given the secular community a great boost, being the first (as far as I know) to stick out his neck and publish a book about atheism with a major publishing company. He’s not going to damage our cause by speaking his mind at the Reason Rally.
Me at a book signing with Dawkins on his tour for The Greatest Show on Earth.
Feb 25, 2012
Have we learned nothing from Comstock?
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Have you even heard of Anthony Comstock? I didn’t learn about him in classes in American history, and never heard the name until I became involved in the atheist and freethought movement. Anthony Comstock was the champion of a set of regulations that made it illegal to send “obscene” materials though the mail.
What qualified as “obscene?” For starters, and for the purpose of this post, any information or objects having anything to do with contraception were forbidden from being sent though the mail by the Comstock Laws. For the crimes of distributing educational materials about birth control, such notable women as Margret Sanger and Elmina D. Slenker were arrested and/or imprisoned. The laws also banned anyone from sending materials having anything to do with sex or sexuality, whether it be porn or medical information. Many others faced arrest and persecution and the shutting down of their magazines and newspapers.
Anthony Comstock was the founder of the eerily named "New York Society for the Suppression of Vice."
The Comstock Laws were passed in 1873, and while they have not been officially repealed they have time and again been crippled due to being found unconstitutional. However, comstockery still pops up its ugly head from time to time in American law and politics.
This is a quote from an apparently approving article in Harper’s Weekly in 1915, where Anthony Comstock’s views and those of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice are described:
If you allow the devil to decorate the Chamber of Imagery in your heart with licentious and sensual things, you will find that he has practically thrown a noose about your neck and will forever after exert himself to draw you away from the “Lamb of God which taketh away sins of the world.” You have practically put rope on memory’s bell and placed the other end of the rope in the devil’s hands, and
though you may will out your mind, the memory of some vile story or picture that you may have looked upon, be assured that even in your most solitary moments the devil will ring memory’s bell and call up the hateful thing to turn your thoughts away from God and undermine all aspirations for holy things.
Let me emphasize one fact, supported by my nearly forty-two years of public life in fighting this particular foe. My experience leads me to the conviction that once these matters enter through the eye and ear into the chamber of imagery in the heart of the child, nothing but the grace of God can ever erase or blot it out.
Finally, brethren, “let us not be weary in well doing, for in due season we shall reap if we faint not.” Raise over each of your heads the banner of the Lord Jesus Christ. Look to Him as you Commander and Leader.
Then, as now, the excuse and justification for limiting the liberties of others comes down to religious belief.
Later in the article, here are the words of Comstock in describing the effects of birth control in response to the questions of the interviewer.
“But,” I protested, repeating an argument often brought forward, although I felt as if my persistence was somewhat placing me in the ranks of those who desire evil rather than good, “If the parents lack that self-control, the punishment falls upon the child.”
“It does not,” replied Mr. Comstock. “The punishment falls upon the parents. When a man and woman marry they are responsible for their children. You can’t reform a family in any of these superficial ways. You have to go deep down into their minds and souls. The prevention of conception would work the greatest demoralization. God has set certain natural barriers. If you turn loose the passions and break down that fear you bring worse disaster than the war. It would debase sacred things, break down the health of women and disseminate a greater curse than the plagues and diseases of Europe.”
Compare this to Santorum’s words.
Santorum pads his opinion by saying he supports Title X from a “governmental perspective” but quickly says that birth control is “bad for women and bad for society.” Implicit in his statements is the idea that sex for any reason other than procreation is sin, and that couples who try to avoid pregnancy when they have sex are avoiding their responsibilities. These are purely religious ideas and nothing based in the realities of human experience.
These are the kinds of motives and ideas behind “abstinence only education” (harkening back to the Comstock idea that educational material about sex is obscene). Also the recent push to allow employers to block insurance coverage of contraception in the name of religious freedom, along with the attempt to do anything possible to prevent women’s voices from being heard in the hearings. There is nothing new here, and nothing that should be surprising to us if we know a bit of American history. Those who would take away our freedoms almost always do so under the guise of good and morality and responsibility, but those ideals are not what is at stake. Let’s take care that history does not repeat itself and take women’s rights back over a century in the process.
Sources and More Information:
Stamping Out Indecency, The Postal Way – A article on the Comstock Laws, and their effects and continuing influence.
Comstock Laws – Women’s Health Encyclopedia
VIOLATING POSTAL LAWS.; A WOMAN ARRESTED FOR MAILING OBSCENE MATTER. – New York Times Article on the arrest of Elmina D. Slenker for distributing “obscene” materials though the mail. I recommend reading it, just for the shock of how they talk about her immoral ways and absolve her husband of all the wrongdoing and shame of her actions. The sexism and condescending tone of the article is breathtaking.
The Birth of the Pill – Article on the history of birth control and the effects of the Comstock Laws.
Women Without Superstition “No God’s No Masters”: The Collected Writings of the Women Freethinkers of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, an anthology compiled by Annie Laurie Gaylor.
Feb 18, 2012
The Vagina Monologues: My Thoughts
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The Vagina Monologues has been in production since 2001, the same year that I transferred my college career to the University of Louisville. I never got around to actually seeing UofL’s annual production of the play until this year. Last Friday in fact, and with my husband. Nevermind that I was a bit nervous about telling him I wanted to go see a show with the word “vagina” in the title. I was open to going by myself if he was not interested, but in the end (and after looking up a few reviews online) he decided to come with me.
The Vagina Monologues at UofL
I was not sure what to expect, even though I had the book. I’d first purchased the book about the same time the play came out, and when I took my single Women’s Studies class at UofL to help fill a requirement in my general education. Women in American Culture. Many ideas that were discussed in the class were very new to me at the time. Things like the way women are sexualized and infantilized in a lot of ads (often at the same time). It was my first exposure to feminist ideas, and it was such a departure from my accustomed mode of thinking that it made my head spin. I remember commenting on a story about how a college-age woman was raped at a college party that maybe she should have been more careful and not gotten drunk. And got jumped on for it, rightly, though I didn’t quite understand the problem at the time. Blaming the victim? Novel idea to me. That I ever made a comment like that amazes me.
I read the class materials with fascination. Stories of fat women, skinny, blacks, whites, Latinos, lesbians, transsexuals… Especially the latter two. I’d been indoctrinated with stories about how it was bad and a perversion of God’s plan to be gay or otherwise live outside the “normal” sexual binary system. I don’t think I’d thought about gays as real people until I read the stories. It’s hard, at least for me, to judge someone as alien and other once they have let you into their story. This interest is what lead me to purchase the book for The Vagina Monologues and read it.
It has been several years since I read the book, though as I watched the play I remembered a few bits and pieces from my reading. It had been so long since I’d read it that I went into the play not really still not knowing what to expect. And reading a transcript and seeing a performance are quite different things, as this experience reminded me. With a book you can skim or skip bits that make you uncomfortable, but when you are watching a play it’s more of a commitment to see the whole thing.
With my scant memory of the book I didn’t know if this was going to be, as one reviewer put it, an embarrassing ”moan fest” or if there would be man-bashing (especially with my husband there). I didn’t want to be made to feel scared, like a victim, like the world is in conspiracy against my personal fulfillment. Those old stereotypes of feminism still haunt me. The play had none of those things, and rather than being angry many of the monologues were actually raucously hilarious. The discussions covered some intense topics like genital mutilation and the use of rape as a weapon of war in the Congo, which were horrifying as they should be and at time made me want to sink down in my seat, but still I listened and let the descriptions wash over me. And even they were not angry, but intensely personal. Then there was the monologue about different types of moans which was the most hilarious of all even though I had worried it would be awkward and embarrassing. The women on stage recounted the responses the interviewees had given to questions like what their vagina’s would wear (which stretches my artistic imagination to the limit) and what it would say and what do they call it?
The most wonderful part to me is that I identified with a lot of the stories myself. Face it, the vagina is not something that gets a lot of press. I recall parts of my childhood and teen years when “down there” was a total enigma to me…I was told that a guy can get you pregnant if he puts his penis there but other than that I was not told much else. I first was exposed to the ideas of “clitoris” and “orgasm” though a sneakily read issue of Cosmo. I know I am not the only girl who has dealt with this guilty silence about her own sexuality. Why such taboo and secrecy about something we all share? Presentations like The Vagina Monologue help.
I’m glad I went to see it. Maybe I will go again next year.
Feb 12, 2012
Why I am An Atheist: Science is better than Faith
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Since I am recently talking about The God Virus, it bears mention that religion is not the only viral idea out there. In my youngest years the “god virus” (to use the metaphor) was not the only viral idea I was exposed to. I was also infected at a young age with a high regard and respect for science and for logic. For a long time I thought these two ideas, the religious idea and the scientific and logical idea, were in no conflict with each other because, naturally, Truth cannot contradict truth.
Throughout my life I have been driven by the search for answers. Not just any answers, but answers that make sense, answers that I can understand well enough that I can competently explain and defend to another person. According to the evangelical religious tradition in which I was raised, it was my duty to “witness” to anyone that I could to bring them into the fold of Christianity so that they would be saved. But I had a problem….even at the point when I most deeply believed, when I tried to speak the ideas out loud I felt a conflict, like there was something unfathomable that was just not right. I didn’t really understand this thing that I was trying to convince others to believe, and I could just imagine all the ways in which a non-believer could shoot down every argument I had in my arsenal. This bothered me immensely. I had to resort to just parroting what others had told me, or just skip the theology completely and just invite my target to come to church with me. My lacking witnessing skills guilted me tremendously, and I prayed fervently that God would grant me boldness and tell me what to say.
So, in my search for sensible answers, I dug into apologetics books by authors like C.S. Lewis, Josh McDowell, Ravi Zacharias, and Max Lucado. Without going into the details of each one, I found the following pattern nearly every time: I would read the book and it would bolster my faith and make me feel good about what I believed. Then, a week or two later the doubts and uncertainties would creep in again and I would read another apologetics book and feel good again…then go back to doubting again in about a week. I ran to the apologists and gobbled up their encouraging words, but didn’t really examine the arguments they were using. I so wanted to believe their conclusions that I didn’t really care if their arguments made sense or not. So when I tried to explain to myself what I had learned from them later I remembered the conclusions and good feelings, but still couldn’t reconstruct the arguments behind the conclusions. So back into doubt I would slide. After several cycles of this I started to get really frustrated.
Little did I realize, I had two conflicting viruses vying for dominance in my mind. I wanted verifiable, scientific, logical answers and I just was not getting what I needed from the previously mentioned apologists. Then I got into creationist literature, including my heavily anti-evolution home-school biology text, and thought for a while that I found what I needed. That science really did support the Bible and Christianity.
I found bits of the truth about evolution and creationism later in college, with the help of Astronomy 101 which explained to me about the Big Bang, and showed me a timeline of the universe including that of life on Earth. That piqued by curiosity and lead me to read more on my own. I was furious at first and felt I had been misled on clear scientific matters by Christian authors I had trusted in the name of God. I gave up on the apologists and creationists and started perusing the science section at our small local library. That is where I found the book form of Cosmos by Carl Sagan, and River out of Eden by Richard Dawkins. And I was hooked.
I started checking out all the books in the local library I could find on both cosmology and evolution. I would bring them home read them guiltily in my room, hiding them under the covers when my parents knocked at the door for fear of their disapproval (I was a bit paranoid perhaps?). This was my rebellion, searching outside the family religion to find my explanations in science. Carl Sagan and Richard Dawkins and other science writers I discovered didn’t simply rush to a desired conclusion. They actually explained each step in the progression of their arguments in a way that I could grasp, slowly building up to the conclusion while I followed along. And it made sense, and still made sense a week later (though I usually had to go back and review.) I was actually learning new things when I read, unlike when I read the apologists, and the new understanding I found was intoxicating. The more I learned, the more my former supernatural beliefs fell away in favor of natural scientific explanations, all the way back to the origin of humanity and the origin of the universe. I could see that there were still gaps in scientific knowledge of course, but science had replaced the supernatural explanations so many times in the past. I couldn’t see any sense in posing supernatural explanations for what we didn’t know yet. To insert “God did it” anywhere in the natural world just made no sense.
The viral idea that truth cannot contradict truth lead me to embrace science and reason over faith.
Happy Darwin Day!
Feb 11, 2012
The “god virus” and American Culture
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In the environment where I grew up, ideas of patriotism were mixed in closely with those of Christianity. It was “one nation under God” and after I came to disbelieve in God it took me a while to stop seeing the American Flag as a Christian symbol.
Not a Christian symbol.
In the book The God Virus, Darrel Ray use a model of a “virus” to describe how religious ideas “infect” people and attempt to gain control and then spread to others. In case you are unfamiliar with the concept of the meme you can think of it this way: Meme theory compares ideas (or pop song hooks, or jingles, etc) with viruses that infect the mind, duplicate themselves and then try to spread to other minds. For instance, when you get a song stuck in your head, you might start singing it out loud within the hearing of others who might get the tune stuck in their heads. If you have ever heard of a YouTube video going “viral,” you have seen this metaphor at work.
Like a biological virus, a meme does not have thought or intention of its own. It’s almost a tautology that the better the idea is at spreading in a population of minds, the more successful it will be. The “virus” only “cares” about replicating itself and staying around as long as possible–it does not necessarily care about the happiness or well-being of the host mind. How often has your mind been infected with a pop tune that you absolutely despise?
In Chapter 3 of The God Virus, Ray talks about the ways that “god viruses” try to gain a safe and secure place in society by integrating themselves with the broader culture. I have long thought that religion and culture were inseparable, but this book has caused me to question that notion. If a religion can so integrate itself with a culture, to the point where it is impossible to live in that culture without being affected and controlled by it, an environment can be developed where few people would be willing to question that virus for fear of repercussions both external and internal. For a contemporary example of this, take a look at Saudi Arabia, and some other Muslim nations, where violation of religious rules comes with strict civil penalties.
For the past few decades, the Christian virus has worked really hard to get itself inseparably coupled to the American culture and way of life. Hence the difficulty I had in my earliest years as an atheist with decoupling Christian ideals from the meme of the American Flag, as I had seen the two memes meshed together so much that I had come to associate them. Even today, there are powerful forces trying to equate Christian religion with American life, from attempts to place Ten Commandments plaques and statues in courthouses, to GOP presidential candidates practically falling over each other to prove their Christian credentials. In recent news, the Catholic Church is attempting to enforce its religious directives on the lives of the employees of Catholic-affiliated hospitals, schools, and charities, under the guise of the American ideal of religious freedom. (I doubt that the Catholic hierarchy cares nearly as much about religious freedom in the countries in which it is fully entrenched, but fitting right in the metaphor, the virus will make concessions in specific environments if that is what it takes to survive.)
Ever since Europeans landed on the American continents, the god virus tried to mesh itself with the newly developing cultures, and with some success. In various colonies, religious tests for office or even for full citizenry were established. Baptist minister Roger Williams, the originator of the phrase “wall of separation between church and state” and founder of the state of Rhode Island, recognized that there were serious problems with meshing civil law and religious life. And for this, he was banished from the Puritan colony of Massachusetts. I was told repeatedly as a child that the Puritans and other non-Anglican groups came to America for religious freedom, but in large part it looks like they came to try and do the same thing to other religions that the Anglican Church had done to them in England. After all the worst enemy of a god virus is a competing god virus, and no virus is totally secure in an environment where all virus can compete freely.
A civil sword (as woeful experience in all ages has proved) is so far from bringing or helping forward an opposite in religion to repentance that magistrates sin grievously against the work of God and blood of souls by such proceedings… Religion cannot be true which needs such instruments of violence to uphold it so. -Roger Williams (source)
We should not be surprised that religious groups are jockeying for control of the American political system, nor that religious groups that were once vicious enemies due to theological differences are now banding together to reach for power. And it is not only legislative and judicial power that are being targeted. Recent claims that America is a “Christian Nation” imply that one cannot fully participate in American life unless one accepts and acknowledges a particular Christian version of the god virus. Difficulties and dangers faced by people who dare to be openly atheistic in certain regions of the country (see Atheism in America for examples) testify to the non-official power that religion can get in a culture. Religious freedom is a beautiful ideal that allows everyone to follow and be influenced by a religion if they wish, or also to avoid religious influence if they do not wish. But an environment of full religious freedom hinders the efforts of individual god viruses to gain dominance and maximum conversion of a population. Therefore we should expect these grabs at power by religous groups that perceive themselves to be in a place to obtain it.
Related articles
- Being an atheist does not mean you have to be alone. (skepticalseeker.com)
- The personal is political: Women’s health choices VS religious freedom? (skepticalseeker.com)
