A guest blogger wrote of Religious Freedom Day in yesterday’s Washington Post. I’ve taken the liberty of rewriting the opening paragraph to reflect reality.

The original:

Across the globe, religion and belief continue to matter deeply in the lives of people and their cultures. From worship to prayer, births to funerals, weddings to holy days, almsgiving to thanksgiving, religion is a central source of identity, meaning, and purpose for billions of human beings.

The reality:

Across the globe, religion and belief continue to worm themselves dangerously into the lives of people and their cultures. From self-abasement to talking to oneself instead of taking action, physically deforming male and female children without their consent to delusional thoughts of deceased loved ones being in a better place, from fighting to allow only a man and a woman to commit to a life together to strange ceremonies concocted by imaginative goatherds of old, giving huge sums of money to support the very system that seeks to control their lives to giving credit to superstition instead of science, religion is a central source of pain, suffering and misery for billions of human beings.

You’re welcome!

I recently ran across a horrible indoctrinational operation targeting children at a local county fair. I had seen their booth over the last few years and just laughed at the mime skits they were using to talk about the accept-Jesus-or-burn-in-hell threat implicit in Christian teaching.

But I always figured it was a local church just a little more whack than the normal evangelical efforts of your friendly baptists. I noticed however that the participants had teeshirts and an acronym “CEF” on the sleeve.

So I looked that up and it turns out this is a worldwide organization called Child Evangelism Fellowship. This is a group that, duh, targets children of the world for indoctrination into the cult of christianity. 

I cannot imagine a stated purpose much worse than warping the brains of children with religious nonsense. The video recently posted by Bill Nye @thescienceguy made this very point. Parents, feel free to believe whatever nonsense you want, but we need logical thinkers out of the next generation and to twist their brains with creationist, religious cult-thought works at cross-purposes to the progress of society.

This group is, by their reports, startlingly effective. A recent press release claims that, in 2011, they reached 12.1 MILLION children with their message, an 11% increase over 2010. They reach kids through a correspondence club, in the US through a Camp Good News program, Military Children’s Ministries,

How on earth can rationalist naturalist freethinkers keep up with this? They hold Good News Club meetings after-hours in public schools and crow about it, though they don’t spend much time mentioning their legal defeat in the effort to have information about their club included with take-home packets the schools sends with kids to give to parents about school activities. 

This is a huge problem.

I’m having trouble with this article in Religious Dispatches, by Austin Dacey, representative to the United Nations for the International Humanist and Ethical Union and author of “The Future of Blasphemy: Speaking of the Sacred in an Age of Human Rights.”

In it he uses the plight of one Alexander Aan, imprisoned in Indonesia for the crime of “inciting hatred or enmity of a religious group, and under the country’s blasphemy provision, Article 156a, which criminalizes “hostility, hatred or contempt” and “disgracing” of a religion. Article 156a also prohibits attempts to persuade others to leave their religion and embrace atheism.”

A reminder, Indonesia’s Constitution stipulates that every person believe in a supreme being. Can you imagine being atheist and visiting Indonesia and what would happen should you have a couple of beers and get into a conversation in the wrong bar? Say goodbye to the return portion of your air fare!

For me the cognitive dissonance comes from statements like:

“In the West…The public debate is about how to balance freedom of speech with respect for religious belief.”

Dacey contrasts his view of the Western framing of the issue with that of predominantly Muslim Indonesia this way:

“Here the value at stake is not just freedom of speech, but freedom of conscience. The real contest is not between atheists and believers, but between those who affirm the equality of all persons of conscience and those who deny it.”

Wrong, wrong, wrong. On both the West and Indonesia. There is no need to respect religious beliefs! To paraphrase someone, perhaps Hitchens, those with ridiculous ideas should be treated as such. Freedom of conscience is a veiled way of giving the religious the right to slap back at any perceived insult.

Then he puts atheism and religion on the same moral level:

“From a moral perspective, there is an important symmetry between the attitude of the believer who reserves special reverence for a deity, saint, or prophet, and the attitude of the secularist who asserts that every person is equally holy.”

He’s treating atheists and atheism as just equal to a religion, just another dogma lookin’ for respect. Nothing could be further from the truth. Atheism leads to humanism, though I admit one can get there from other vectors, but religion is full of the exact opposite of humanism.

Anywhere religion holds sway over a majority of the citizenry, and especially where religion is baked in to the government is a bad, dangerous place to be, for this is where only those with the facts on their side are persecuted. Respect for religion is the worst answer to the problems of the world and for the ability of every person to think for themselves and express their ideas.

I’m having trouble with this article in Religious Dispatches, by Austin Dacey, representative to the United Nations for the International Humanist and Ethical Union and author of “The Future of Blasphemy: Speaking of the Sacred in an Age of Human Rights.”

In it he uses the plight of one Alexander Aan, imprisoned in Indonesia for the crime of “inciting hatred or enmity of a religious group, and under the country’s blasphemy provision, Article 156a, which criminalizes “hostility, hatred or contempt” and “disgracing” of a religion. Article 156a also prohibits attempts to persuade others to leave their religion and embrace atheism.”

A reminder, Indonesia’s Constitution stipulates that every person believe in a supreme being. Can you imagine being atheist and visiting Indonesia and what would happen should you have a couple of beers and get into a conversation in the wrong bar? Say goodbye to the return portion of your air fare!

For me the cognitive dissonance comes from statements like:

“In the West…The public debate is about how to balance freedom of speech with respect for religious belief.”

Dacey contrasts his view of the Western framing of the issue with that of predominantly Muslim Indonesia this way:

“Here the value at stake is not just freedom of speech, but freedom of conscience. The real contest is not between atheists and believers, but between those who affirm the equality of all persons of conscience and those who deny it.”

Wrong, wrong, wrong. On both the West and Indonesia. There is no need to respect religious beliefs! To paraphrase someone, perhaps Hitchens, those with ridiculous ideas should be treated as such. Freedom of conscienceis a veiled way of giving the religious the right to slap back at any perceived insult.

Then he puts atheism and religion on the same moral level:

“From a moral perspective, there is an important symmetry between the attitude of the believer who reserves special reverence for a deity, saint, or prophet, and the attitude of the secularist who asserts that every person is equally holy.”

He’s treating atheists and atheism as just equal to a religion, just another dogma lookin’ for respect. Nothing could be further from the truth. Atheism leads to humanism, though I admit one can get there from other vectors, but religion is full of the exact opposite of humanism.

Anywhere religion holds sway over a majority of the citizenry, and especially where religion is baked in to the government is a bad, dangerous place to be, for this is where only those with the facts on their side are persecuted. Respect for religion is the worst answer to the problems of the world and for the ability of every person to think for themselves and express their ideas.

“The essence of science is that it is always willing to abandon a given idea, however fundamental it may seem to be, for a better one; the essence of theology is that it holds its truths to be eternal and immutable.” H.L. Mencken

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.

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