@State_We_re_In Yes, oppression does stem from Islam, as it does from all the Abrahamic faiths. You are making a common error in assessment in which you conclude that those who don’t practice the complete set of instructions in any given “holy” book are somehow a great example of how a religion can be expressed. This error is seen in assessing the practice of Islam, Christianity and Judaism.

The Taliban, al Qaeda, Ultra Orthodox Jews and evangelical Christians are all examples of those who try to follow most closely to their scriptures. The larger world — the non-religious, those looking at another faith from the perspective of adherence to a different religion, and the more moderate practitioners of each faith — rightly look askance at the “purists” of a faith. They rightly note that strict adherence to any of a long list of instructions in these scriptures would land a modern person in prison for a long time. 

Those who follow any faith more loosely allow themselves to say “hey, I’m not crazy like those extremists!” Yet by their very participation and perpetuation of the faith they make it easier for the extremists to find sanctuary.

These girls, and Muslim women generally, are subject to various levels of subjugation and degradation based on the chauvinistic, misogynistic texts written by ancient goat herds. 

To the extent that the girls in the story, or any Afghan girls are getting better schooling than their mother is strictly by dint of the U.S. occupation of their country, and, if I were Mitt Romney, I’d lay a $10,000 bet that this doesn’t hold long after we’ve drawn down our troops.

As it is they have to worry about threats to themselves, their father and their coach, based on the practice of Islamic teachings relevant to their desires for the same freedoms enjoyed by girls in Western cultures.

The decision to say it is anything other than religious oppression can only be called cultural relativism, which is just as odious. Thinking that somehow persons of a different culture do not have the same desire for, or rights to, freedom of thought and from threats based on gender that we wish for for our own daughters is truly twisted logic.

I welcome your thoughts.

Hellish Dreams of Hell

I just bought, and cannot wait to have delivered, a book titled “Breaking Their Will: Shedding Light on Religious Child Maltreatment”, by Janet Heimlich. I expect to see a fair amount of my background in this book, having been raised by fundamentalist, evangelical parents.

Ms. Preach and I were talking last night about my involvement in the freethought, atheistic and humanistic causes. She was with an unprejudiced eye asking why it meant so much to me, and a little about why it is something that I think about all the time. I was surprised that my answer was a revelation (pun intended) to her. After all, we’ve been together for over 20 years and atheism was one of the first things we talked about.

My parents church “brought it,” week in and week out. Fire and brimstone. Hell or heaven, son, your choice. I was run through an hour and a half of Sunday school first thing in the morning followed by an hour long church service. The service started with about 20 minutes of prayer, singing of hymns, fleecing of the flock (passing of the collection plate) and then 40 minutes of bible-thumping. Always starting with a different section of the NT, but always tying back to the theme, accept Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior or spend eternity screaming in agony in the eternal fire. This was capped with another hour-long service every Sunday evening. Then came Wednesday nights, where it was a couple hours of prayer service or in a Christian version of Boy Scouts. You think the real Scouts are God-pod people? You should have seen this group. Christian Service Brigade.

So I, not wanting to spend forever (how do you dare explain never-ending time to a child, let alone tell them if you don’t accept you’ll spend that time in excruciating pain?) I did it. Twice.

First, in Sunday school at about 10 years old. Overwhelmed with fear I told myself I better do this. I won’t have to worry about hell and, heck, this dweeby kid might just be more accepted within this social group that we now know more correctly to be a cult.

The second time was at a sleep-away camp when I was 13 or 14. Someplace where you spent the day enjoying all the usual outdoor activities, but after dinner came the service. All the campers in sanctuary, chapel, or whatever you want to call it, for a hard-sell on heaven vs. hell. They even employed the soft, give up your resistance, music that Billy Graham played to break the will of entire stadiums of people as they called, gently, for the un-saved to come to the front to give their life to God.

But the dreams never went away. The sliding boards. And they didn’t go away until I was in my 30’s. This recurring dream was a field of sliding boards, barely lit and no light in the background. I was on one of the slides. The trick was, I was presented with a fork in the slide every few seconds and had to instantly choose a direction. One slide would take me to hell, the other offered the opportunity to continue making choices.

This would go on until I woke up in a cold sweat. When still a child I would wake up crying and afraid. But having been through the process of accepting Jesus and asking forgiveness of my sins held no relief in those moments.

While I began to realize it was all a crock around the time I started to drive, it was a long time before I was no longer a broken person. I still have a filter on life that is not what those around me see and it is hard to explain to them.

The rest of my life will be dedicated to preaching atheism because of what I went through as a child and how it affected my life.

Peace

When Did The Wall Go Up?

I flew in to Southern California before Winter Solstice/Christmas to see my Dad, who this week had a heart valve repair. The operation is one of the first of its kind here, using a robotic machine that avoids the invasive sawing of the sternum, instead going in under his left arm somehow or another. I guess I’ll get the full story when I see him for the first time Sunday morning. The good news is his valve is repaired and he’s coming home sooner than anticipated.

I like my parents. I even feel love for them. It’s sort of hard not to. They raised me and my siblings after all. But as I’ve said before, they’re fundies. As the oldest child I got the brunt of the, let’s call it enthusiasm, (others might use words like “vituperation”) in service of molding me in the finely tuned dogmatic expectations of the One True God, whose son died for my sins. 

This led to me wandering the desert of my early adult years trying to get a grip on “what the hell just happened here?!” The terse teen years became the “check-in-every-six-month years. I needed space between the whippings with the leather belt, the socially backward insistence that I not attend high school dances - “you know what kind of trouble dancing causes…” and the never ending church attendance requirements. Three services on Sundays and more on Wednesday.

But I eventually got over it, figured out that atheism is where I stood and worked to rebuild an adult relationship with them on my own terms. (To this date it doesn’t involve a direct discussion of my atheism, but they sure as heck never ask me to pray over a meal any more.)

Tonight I was greeted by my mom at the door of their home. We sat down to chat as I opened a delicious, real burrito. The kind you can only get this close to the Mexican border. And as we started to talk about how it went at the hospital today, with her peppering her statements with “…thank the lord (fill in the blank)…” I found myself just glazed over.

I realized that no matter how much I worked to rebuild a relationship with them, there’s always going to be this wall between us. I’m sure I built in my mind as a defense against the source of so much childhood angst, but I’m just as sure it can’t come down.

I still feel for them. I came out to see Dad in a time of personal uncertainty. Heart operations at 75 years old can be a dicey proposition. I’m a humanist at heart (pun intended) and will never hold back showing them respect, love and grace.

But there’s that damn wall. And it’s always going to be there.

Hitchens’ Prescient Quote of Primo Levi

In the introduction to The Portable Atheist Hitch has two quotes from Primo Levi. This one, so relevant to Hitchens’ death, is from The Drowned and the Saved:

“I too entered the Lager as a nonbeliever, and as a nonbeliever I was liberated and have lived to this day. Actually, the experience of the Lager with its frightful iniquity confirmed me in my nonbelief. It has prevented me, and still prevents me, from conceiving any form of providence or transcendent justice…I must nevertheless admit that I experienced (and again only once) the temptation to yield, to seek refuge in prayer. This happened in October 1944, in the one moment in which I lucidly perceived the imminence of death…naked and compressed among my naked companions with my personal index card, I was waiting to file past the ‘commission’ that with one glance would decide whether I should go immediately to the gas chamber or was instead strong enough to go on working. For one instance I felt the need to ask for help and asylum; then, despite my anguish, equanimity prevailed: one does not change the rules of the game at the end of the match, nor when you are losing. A prayer under these circumstances would have been not only absurd (what rights could I claim? And from whom?) but blasphemous, obscene. Laden with the greatest impiety of which a nonbeliever is capable. I rejected the temptation: I knew that otherwise we’re I to survive, I would have to be ashamed of it.”

Damn powerful stuff there.

Belief Tragically Facilitates a Suicide

A story in today’s New York Times (Dec. 10, 2011) describes the sad choice of a promising young man to end his own life. The story has become a sensation in the debate over the Dream Act, but everyone seems to be ignoring an underlying condition that distorted the reality of his options.

Joaquin Luna Jr.’s death at the age of 18 came after dressing up in a maroon shirt and tie and laying next to his mom in bed. He told her “he was never going to be what he wanted to be.” Then he went into the bathroom and put a handgun under his chin.

He was born in Mexico and came to the States as an infant and had aspirations of becoming an engineer or architect. But while immigration advocates seized onto the story as an example of the internal suffering and depression that comes with trying to find a way a country in which one is not a citizen, facts all too often ignored are being glossed over here.

His suicide writings were illuminating. Quoting here from the Times article:

In brief letters to relatives, friends and teachers, he asked one of his brothers to take care of his nephews and his niece and told a friend he had left a memento for her in his Bible.

One letter was different from the rest. It was addressed to Jesus Christ, and in it he asked for forgiveness. “Jesus,” he wrote, “I’ve realized that I have no chance in becoming a civil engineer the way I’ve always dreamed of here … so I’m planning on going to you and helping you construct the new temple in heaven.”

The rational mind recoils not just at the thinking of this poor young man (who you can hardly blame, as he was taught this was so), but at the credulous treatment by the Times, and almost all media, of religious claims.

Now here we have what is just the latest victim of belief. In this case, belief in false options. This young man staked his “future” on the religious claims of an afterlife. What a horrible distortion of the available options.

This young man, given a rational upbringing, would have known that, while his options may have been daunting, they still required some sort of solution in this life. And given that the options are all of this earth, would have focused his engineering mind on a solution.

This is just one more example of why indoctrinating children in religious teachings amounts to child abuse and why I preach atheism and practice humanism.

Peace.

For Angelique

Angelique,

Atheists are some of the most loving, humanistic folk on the face of the planet. Many of us, including me, came from religious backgrounds.

We share a common skepticism about religious claims. We simply don’t see the proof of god. There just isn’t any.

From there we see the tremendous damage done to humanity in the name of religion. This can be attributed to almost every religion, be it Judaism, Islam, Christianity or scores of others.

You say you are aware only of the one true god, as Muslims refer to allah. But, as pointed out in an earlier tweet, your lack of awareness of the literally thousands of other claimed gods does not mean the claims never occurred.

All of them are constructs of humans. They reflect the prejudices and fears of mankind. They frequently clash, not just with each other, but within the “holy” book of any given religion. 

And someone still needs to explain to me why I should follow a religion for which there is not only no proof of the supposed all-powerful, all-seeing, all-knowing being, but one that is so incredibly predisposed to inflict pain on mankind.

If god were to suddenly reveal itself I would have no problem looking it in the eye and calling it a mean-spirited, hateful thing.

The bible and koran both have god authorizing rape of young girls. They both advocate murder, genocide and slavery. Where’s the goodness in that?

All I can hope for, Angelique, and for all religious persons, is that you step outside and look inward at what you are vested in so heavily. Look at the number of religions and their various claims and don’t be afraid to find a new answer to what’s real.

Thanks for listening.

Catholics are dicks about wrapped up dicks

The Catholic church unsurprisingly continues to fight proposed rules by Health and Human Services to make free contraceptive services available to all persons as part of their insurance plans.

It’s not enough for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (but too much for humanistic persons) that only churches would enjoy an exemption. Other organizations such as hospitals, schools and clinics would have to allow such services as part of the program. 

Get this quote from Sister Mary Ann Walsh, a spokeswoman for the bishops:

You are forcing a Catholic organization to pay for something that goes directly against their belief system. Their Christian faith is what drives such groups to serve needy people regardless of religion.

If I get what she’s saying, if it were not for religion, they wouldn’t give a damn about the needy. But since they’re religious, they get to dictate the terms of the lives of the persons with whom they interact, whether that be an employee or a recipient of services.

That’s Klassy, with a capital “K.”

An Open Letter to Billboard Co That Denyed Atheist Message

Ms. Siegenthaler, 

Please reconsider the decison of Lind to not post the billboards for the Mid-Ohio Atheists. I’m not sure what you think an atheist is, but I’ll tell you anyway; It’s merely someone who does not see the evidence for a supernatural being.  Perhaps you’d like to post some bible verses instead? How about these:

• Deuteronomy 17:12 - The man who shows contempt for the judge or for the priest who stands ministering there to the LORD your God must be put to death. You must purge the evil from Israel.
• Exodus 21:15 - Whoever strikes his father or mother shall be put to death.
• Leviticus 20:9 - If a man commits adultery with another man’s wife, both the man and the woman must be put to death.
• Leviticus 21:9 - A priest’s daughter who loses her honor by committing fornication and thereby dishonors her father also, shall be burned to death.
• 2 Chronicles 15:12-13 - They entered into a covenant to seek the Lord, the God of their fathers, with all their heart and soul; and everyone who whould not seek the Lord, the God of Israel, was to be put to death, whether great or small, whether man or woman.

Or, if you’d rather have the bible endorse rape, let’s all turn in our bibles to:

• Deuteronomy 22:23-24 If within the city a man comes upon a maiden who is betrothed, and has relations with her, you shall bring them both out of the gate of teh city and there stone them to death: the girl because she did not cry out for help though she was in the city, and the man because he violated his neighbor’s wife. 

And so it goes. 
I’m sorry, but your claim of “best interests of the community at large” doesn’t really fly. You allow billboards by churches, who preach fear of hell to little children to drive them to subjugate themselves to a supposed god (actually, the local minister/pastor/priest) rather than teaching them to think critically and rationally for themselves. 
A question - would you similarly deny posting of a billboard proclaiming evolution as the history of life on earth? 
Here’s hoping you come to your senses, and if you don’t, here’s hoping Lind get sued to the hilt. 
Thanks,
An Atheist Based on http://midohioatheists.org/?p=1120

Lind Outdoor Advertising Company
409-411 North Main Street
Mansfield, OH 44902

1-800-444-LIND / 419-522-2600 / fax: 419-522-1323

Maura Siegenthaler
Vice President - Lind Media Company
409 North Main Street
Mansfield, Ohio 44902
419.522.2600 / 419.571.4286(cell)
mss@lindoutdoor.com

Religion in my kid’s school

Well, it is a religion-intensive season, but I am still put out by what the kid brought home from school today. It has put my brain into a fit of cognitive dissonance. There was a Thanksgiving program which incorporated two religious songs.

The first was The Prayer, by Carol Bayer Sager and David Foster and the second was Shalom Chaverim. Neither is over the top with Jesus or hell or any of the prostration and subjugation that makes up a typical sermon. But they both refer to a supernatural being as the bestower of goodness and the creator of the universe. 

The site for Shalom Chaverim hilariously doesn’t spell out the word god, opting instead for the more reverential (?) “g-d” indicator! And all I need to know about The Prayer and to know that it is to be avoided is that it was covered by Celine Dione.

The program also included the Pledge of Allegiance (for which the kid has been dutifully trained to say “one nation, under dog…) and America the Beautiful (what with god shedding all over everything under tarnation).

The dissonance comes from wanting like hell to write a polite letter to the principal to ask that such music be kept out of school-sponsored events. But, my S.O. is working to sign a consulting contract with the school. So I pretty much have to keep my mouth shut or risk losing the (much-needed) income.

Is it more right to do what’s right to keep the family afloat or to work to keep religion out of school?