The war of words is lost again, this time the Catholics winning. In an @AP news item the opening sentence reads:

“Sharpening an election-year confrontation over religious freedom and government health insurance rules…”

When the AP refers to the “other side’s” position in exactly the way they want it framed, even though it is patently wrong, it demonstrates that the Catholic church has successfully repeated the phrase “religious freedom” often enough to make it look as if freedom is being denied them rather than the other way around. Or, more correctly put, they are fighting to retain their self-assigned “right” to discriminate against those who don’t follow their crazy cult beliefs.

330 schoolgirls & teachers poisoned in 1 month in Afghanistan. #Islam keeps giving & giving. Or is that taking & taking lives & liberties from women. As described in Jonathan Turley’s article, Islamic men work to close schools that dare teach girls and women and, failing that, work to disfigure or kill them. 

Interesting then, the comparison with the US religious right and the zeal to inculcate youth with the poison of fairy tales and un-humanistic dogma. While the US right isn’t throwing acid on or outright killing girls, they do share the common goal of steering learning to insular private schools, many feeding off the public teat, where their crazed teachings can be passed on without the challenge of rational thought.

The US religious right is only better than the Taliban by a matter of degree, the goal is the same.

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.

I’m first on the wagon to keep #sharia from being used here in the US and everywhere. But it seems to me to be a tricky strategy to go exclusively after sharia. 

When I think of sharia I think of it in terms of not just the worst options like beheadings, stonings, honor killings and loss of limb but the more insidious things like all the subjection of women to second class status. 

But what this all boils down to is that, by participation in the religion, voluntarily or less than voluntarily, a person subjects themselves to this secondary law, to which, in some countries, like the UK, civil courts defer. The “voluntary” nature of religion is a subject until itself as many are participants of a religion due strictly to the “inherited” nature of having been indoctrinated into the cult from the earliest days of childhood by the very parents whose job it is to prepare your mind for the big world.

Here in the US (and presumably elsewhere) a couple married in the eyes of civil and Jewish religious law and who want to divorce have to be granted divorce by both bodies if either party wants to be granted a new marriage under Jewish law. 

To me it seems that the most practical thing is to abolish ALL religious law in the US. It’s silly to have, or even condone, a secondary unelected, potentially coercively adopted, “legal” system for religions. Count me in the camp for abolition of ALL religious “law” in the U.S. at least. 

What has SCOTUS previously decided that may inform the debate over contraception?

In a post from today, lawyer Jonathan Turley discusses past cases that shed light on how the court may view a case brought by religious folk saying that they cannot be forced to accommodate use of contraceptives. 

In discussing Employment Division v. Smith (1990) Scalia, writing for the 6-3 majority says “the incidental effect of a generally applicable and otherwise valid provision, the First Amendment has not been offended.”

See the rest of his post for the full discussion…http://jonathanturley.org/2012/02/12/employment-division-v-smith/#more-45239

Peace

@Douthoughts Ross, you think that just because someone holds an opinion, they have a right that it be enforced?

You quote a poll saying that a combined 58% of Americans are of the opinion that abortion should be illegal in all circumstances or in only a few circumstances.

Combined with another stat you quote, 329,445 annual abortions, you are suggesting that 58% of the people want to jump into the womb of 0.001% of the population and insist that every conception must be brought to term?

Sorry. We can’t let the prying paternalism of you and your ilk stand. We’re going to fight you tooth and nail for the right of each woman to determine when her body can be used for reproduction.

@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.

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.