Tag Archives: First Amendment

Religiophobia

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Two pieces in the last three days have opened my eyes to a new reality.  Being opened to a new reality doesn’t happen every day, probably because as you get older there are fewer realities that are actually new.  Just things you have forgotten that seem new when you rediscover them.

One article which was good enough to repost in its entirety came from Jacques Berlinerblau, who often says wise things and should be heeded when he does.  Jacques has commented frequently on the need for secularists and even atheists to learn table manners and not rely simply on the assumed rectitude of their position while trying to influence people and win converts.

They could learn a lesson from that old time religion, Christianity, where instead of just shouting at people, like John the Baptist did (and look what happened to him), St Paul professed to become all things to all men in order to win souls to his cause.  Eventually, that strategy made Christianity the majority faith of the Roman empire.

Of course, the atheists old and new don’t believe there are souls to be won.  But there are political values at stake, and elections, and demographics which atheists and “seculars” do claim to care about.  But so far Americn secularism hasn’t had the savvy to know how to preach its gospel in a way that (really) ups the numbers.

For Berlinerblau, this has something to do with an historical incompetence at every level of the secular movment: Without naming names that could be named, he cites

“…a colossal failure of leadership and strategic vision. Those who advocated on its behalf in the 1970s and ’80s had little understanding of who their irate, coalescing adversaries actually were. In the secular mindset these “Fundies” were just a bunch of yokels, sitting on their front porches, cleaning their guns to the musical accompaniment of Pa strumming the gutbucket. In reality, however, the movement had scads of charismatic and savvy, if not incendiary, leaders. …Secular leadership, by contrast, was static and moribund.

Which brings me to the second piece, by E J Dionne, a truly liberal soul.  The always bluff Freedom from Religion Foundation, which sees itself as a “radical” conservator of First Amendment rights, has outed liberal Catholics for being hypocrites and challenged them to do the right thing: leave the Church.  Writes Dionne:

Recently, a group called [the FFRF] ran a full-page ad in The Washington Post cast as an “open letter to ‘liberal’ and ‘nominal’ Catholics.” Its headline commanded: “It’s Time to Quit the Catholic Church.”

The ad included the usual criticism of Catholicism, but I was most struck by this paragraph: “If you think you can change the church from within — get it to lighten up on birth control, gay rights, marriage equality, embryonic stem-cell research — you’re deluding yourself. By remaining a ‘good Catholic,’ you are doing ‘bad’ to women’s rights. You are an enabler. And it’s got to stop.”

Yes, it does sound just like the nun who told you to give up looking at dirty magazines during math class. Or maybe I have given away too much of my eighth grade year at St Joseph School.

But there is a pattern here that displays itself, as in neon lights, through the shouting.  I have commented more than three times on this site about the ugliness of the American Atheists’ (and others’) billboard campaigns and the way atheism itself is promoted by using a strategy that depends, basically, on repeating one hundred times the mantra:  “Wake Up Stupid: Nobody is at Home Up There.”

This is supported by the infinitely reasonable proposition that if there is no Santa Claus, no big bad wolf, and no such thing as ghosts, there is no Sky Fairy either. Anyone who says there is is just using up the oxygen that smart people need to grow brain cells.

But guess what?  Many people who would call themselves religious–like E J Dionne, and even the resoundingly secular Jacques Berlinerblau–are not at all stupid.  And they wonder why the advocates of freethought and secularism don’t get that.  Why is a secularism that flows from principles of religious tolerance more suspect than a secularism that flows from atheist suppositions?  It is a good question, because in those countries where a dogmatic atheism has been imposed from the top, tolerance has not fared well.  Restrictive practices based on the godlike perfection of the state–witness Chen Guangcheng– have.

And that leads me to conclude: there is a troubling religiophobia going on here.  The shouters and ultimatum-givers are not just in favor of separation of church and state, or freedom of (or from) religion, or secularism or the right not to believe in God and say so openly.

There is profound stress and anxiety about religion in these movements.

Why?

Is this a teenage anger pathology that comes from a passive fear of the gods? A bad church experience that stems from the awakening that Pastor Bob (or Sister Mary Therese) lied to you about…everything? The possibility that despite social approval of your atheism, your private doubts sometimes clash with that approval and put unreasonable and seductive thoughts in your head–a hankering for a ten o’lock sermon or a quick Mass at St Aloysius?

Probably none of the above.  It’s probably more easily explained as your anxiety over the existence of what you have come to believe is SPS–Stupid People Syndrome:  your feeling that the co-existence of atheists and believers has only been paralleled in human history by the brief co-existence of Neanderthal and modern humans.  And it would, after all, be so much easier if social disapproval could be generalized and society were rid of religion once and for all–its lures and seductions driven from the world and the gods into the fiery pit.   Maybe then you could get some sleep.  And stop being so Angry.

Homo Religiosus

Until the day that happens and the First Amendment is repealed, which is what the solution would require, reading Seneca and a little Marcus Aurelius or Lucretius on the gods would help:  They had this phobia mastered long before Christian thinkers like Boethius took up the question.   The gods are lazy blighters who don’t care about you. They only care about themselves. You are on your own.

The point is, religiophobia leads to aggression and aggression often manifests itself in stupidity and rash behavior.  I am not certain, given the religious perspective that God takes care of everything, that religion exhibits fear in quite the same way–which is a poor way of saying that fear of the gods (theophobia) is different from fear that there are no gods (religiophobia).

Oh, I know: you atheists out there will tell me I am making things up and that every atheist has the courage of his convictions and isn’t afraid of the big bad wolf or the big old sky fairy or any of those things.  And I say: Good for you, Pinocchio.  Then stop worrying about what goes on in the heads of religious women and men, or their being hypocrites for believing some of the things you no longer believe.

–And read some Seneca.

Terry Jones: Another View

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Cyrus Tahir is a graduate of the distinguished Lahore University of Management Studies in Lahore, Pakistan, and of the University of Warwick, U.K.  He now lives in London.

The oppression brings a reaction: Indiscriminate bombing of people who’ve never had the chance to equip themselves with the academic tools of the modern-world and to understand the intricacies of political, social and economic games that are played in the realm of world politics.

They live and have always lived by a system of tribal allegiances which has supplied them justice, social harmony, support and a life that they have enjoyed for centuries. When the need occurred, the world in general, and the US in particular, conveniently decided to support the war-lords and tribes, facilitating the importation of warriors from different parts of the globe into Afghanistan. Whilst these were men and children from a wide spectrum of Islamic schools of thought, one particular brand was keenly supported owing to their views about waging holy war and the concept of Jihad.

The pragmatic-realist US government discerned the need of the hour: as an expedient, it allowed the training of millions of individuals for warfare against the communist threat. The scale of the training can be imagined by the fact that a late Pakistani army officer, who worked in close proximity with the CIA, Sen. Charlie Wilson and was even trained in the US, single-handedly trained 95,000 people for waging America’s own holy war.

What wasn’t done was to equip these ‘units’ as he called them, with education, and the  knowledge and skill to live their lives and earn their livings once the war was over.

Thanks to the training given to them, these people of local Afghan origin, Pakistanis, Africans, Arabs and others from the Balkans knew how to make incendiary bombs from items of daily usage but did not know the Pythagorean theorem or history, beyond their own, or literature–a gap in education that haunts all and sundry across the globe today.

The Taliban (literally  ‘the students’) were merely a part of these warring forces who supported the US cause and were left to their own devices once the Soviets retreated. With ample ammunition, a culture of tribalism and war, plenty of stinger missiles to play with and no sign of any of the GOD’s enemy (the US had first invoked term to describe the USSR), what any warring nation or people would do is no hard task to imagine.

Someone tells a person that the entire system you have believed in all your life is going to be taken away from you and you are the only one who can save it.  Without fail, the instinct to be a saviour arises – such is the fragility of  human-kind. Not to forget the often quoted phrase, ‘Give a man a bullet & he’ll want a gun. Give the man a gun and he’ll be giving away bullets.’

Soviet troop withdrawal

The Terry Jones Affair

There is ample room for pointing fingers and blaming the Revd. Terry Jones or the Afghan mullahs for the cold-hearted murder of UN workers and the desecration of the Holy Quran. What needs to be looked at is the underlying reasons for the occurrence of these events.

The oppression and wave of terror faced by even the most peaceful of citizens in the Northern tribal belt of Pakistan and bordering areas of Afghanistan is the worst imaginable. Un-manned drone attacks, indiscriminate carpet bombing and the total lack of value for life by the US forces has become the daily norm. Whilst the pastor was operating fully within his constitutional guarantee of free speech and did not violate American law by burning the Holy Quran, what the security forces and their operatives have been doing in South Asia is not acceptable under any law, local or foreign.

What does one expect of a population that has been marred by war, grossly mistrusts the US, has always been a proud nation that detests invaders and wants to live by their own laws which are a mixture of tribal custom and laws emanating from religion.

In the same way that any liberal would defend Mr. Jones’s right to burn the Quran under the provisions of the American Constitution, an Afghan could perhaps demand his death under the laws which he is governed by. A simple case of quid pro quo. The issue with the US government, from the standpoint of the Islamic states, has not been its democratic values but its hypocrisy. Dictated by political expediency, the same Islamic law, which might find Mr. Terry Jones guilty and subject to the death penalty, was invoked in getting Mr. Raymond Davis free after he murdered two young men in broad-daylight.

Raymond Davis, freed by ransom

There are two things that deserve comment, in my capacity as a Pakistani citizen viewing these events and knowing something about the historical context where they unfolded.  I cannot and will not be party to any causes which condone the murder of any individual, be it a UN worker, a soldier or a civilian caught in the midst of a fight.

However, we must accept the fact that whereas the US constitution lays down rights and liberties for everyone, so does every constitution in the world in relation to its own people. I am not an expert in constitutional law but I think that the claim to have a right to burn a book revered and held as a Holy book must be weighed in the balance against the existence of a law that bars anyone from committing acts against another citizen’s set of beliefs and values. That said, Mr. Jones is allowed under the US constitution to desecrate the Quran, yet the effects of this act materialize in a country whose constitutional law forbids desecration of the Quran and in certain case specifies the death penalty.

If put into context, these laws propose a “will of the people and citizens” put into writing and effect by elected members of the government and accepted as laws that the citizens of the country regard as correct. This does not necessarily mean that there is no recourse if the laws are mis-used or abused for the good of one or with mala-fide intention.

Essentially, while the American law may not require respect for any religion, I think it does not necessarily indicate that the actions of any individual towards religion must be disregarded. Thus Mullah Kashaf’s demands–though they may be out of context in the US society and law–seem to hint at the outburst of reaction that may occur across the globe.

The US government is not seen as a saviour by all even in Afghanistan and the perception that the Afghans want the same values and lifestyle as the citizens of the US is perhaps the incorrect of generalizations.

It is extremely wrong to believe that the United States has sent its soldiers in Afghanistan to provide the Afghan people with a better future, for a multiplicity of reasons. Primarily, there was never a call from Afghanistan itself or the people to invite the US forces into Afghanistan. It had a great deal to do with the US’s obsession of Osama Bin Laden and not much to do with the more recently developed rationale of granting liberties to the Afghan people.

The incidents that have come out through the news and other sources tell a different story than that of providing liberty and peace to the Afghan populace.  Now Terry Jones is part of this larger story.

What must also be noted is the fact that during the early 90’s when Mullah Omar and his regime reigned in parts of Afghanistan, the women felt so safe that they did not bother covering themselves in the presence of unknown males, if these males belonged to the Taliban. There are hard-liners and moderates in every stream of life. Cases of domestic violence are aplenty in the US, the UK and the Arab world. Women are not allowed to drive cars or leave homes without their male relatives in many parts of the world, yet the US continues to support the regimes; for obvious vested interests. Therefore, the logic of helping build a better Afghanistan does not hold much weight. Perhaps, the US forces would be better off with their young men and women confined to the boundaries of the US whilst the religious zealots of Afghanistan fight amongst themselves from the remains of what the US left behind.

Explain: Why?

I could not agree more with the principle that there is no moral equivalency of the Mr. Jones’ actions and the actions committed in Afghanistan. But once we take into context the fact that hundreds of Afghan citizens are indiscriminately killed in the search for a group of men, these are citizens who have never had the chance to actually receive education and were left in the lurch with guns, weapons and training, training in how to build bombs once the USA’s purpose of defeating the USSR was achieved.

What they are left with is hatred for a country and anything to do with it and the idea of violent opposition to anything that comes their way with violence.  The murder of the UN workers may seem only a small part of their daily life.

The Devil in Mr Jones

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Codex Gigas (The Devil Codex)

Since I posted my commentary on the Terry Jones case I’ve received lots of feedback–mainly attempts to vindicate Jones and wondering why I am “coddling Muslims.”  I like the term feedback because it doesn’t discriminate as to the quality of responses.  Some were actually very insightful–the ones laying out, for example, the conditions for incitement and sedition; some less so–the ones that simply insist that we are citizens of a democracy that values free speech above everything else. I’ve received no recipes for coddled Muslims, but I’m sure they’ll be coming soon.

Often misquoted, in the United States v. Schenck case (1919: involving a man’s distribution of anti-draft flyers during World War I), Justice Holmes wrote that

The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic. […] The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent.

“Falsely” is the word that is often omitted. What emerged was the “clear and present danger test,”  since weakened and greatly modified.

I’m reliably informed by no fewer than three lawyer-respondents and my buddy Guido that its successor, the “imminent lawless action” criterion, cannot reasonably be applied in this case because the damage and the loss of human life, even though preventable, did not transpire on American soil and that under current law (Hess v. Indiana [1973], Brandenburg v. Ohio [1969]), Jones would likely be given a pass.

And even though Americans, according to groups claiming responsibility, including Afghani Taliban, were the target (United Nations workers were an easier and softer hit), so far (April 5th) American soldiers did not die as a result of this provocation.  On the other hand, those who have replied that it was not Jones’s intention to do harm have not been following the story closely enough: he is quoted in the Washington Post as saying that after due consideration he felt he had no choice, and was only indecisive as to the method of execution (drowning, shredding, or shooting).  Fire is always the first choice of southern Christian bigots. And there is the small matter of his careful plans to broadcast the events in English and Arabic.

But my guess is that Terry Jones will become a kind of hero.  He already is to his congregation and thousands of well-wishing ultra-conservative Christians around the country. And much more cheaply than buying billboards, his gallon of kerosene has ignited his “Stand up for America” campaign.

But I hope he will not become a culture-hero to people who see his actions as brave and somehow correct–as a test case of the right to express hatred in equal measure to the religious population of a country where American lives are being lost each week in defense of democratic principles that the Afghan people, like the Iraqis before them, have shown no natural interest in pursuing on their own.  I am highly distrustful of the respondents who say they “disagree” with Terry Jones, but approve of the principle.  What principle?  That Islam is evil and he is no more evil than it is?  Or that his example serves as proof to the world (as if it cares) that America is the beacon for the unfettered right to speak even the most hateful and dwarfish ideas openly?

Terry Jones is not fighting for a principle.  He’s merely hiding behind one. It seems plain tawdry to invoke the Universal Declaration of Human Rights on behalf of a listless cracker who wants to see people killed seven  thousand miles away from his sanctuary.

A weird  undercurrent of responses has seen Jones as a symbol of the cowboy freedom to shoot the people who get on his nerves. It’s hardly a mariage de covenance (like the one between anti-abortion Catholics and fundamentalists), but Islam is regarded by right wing Christians, as well as by many atheists, as a toxic faith, so the symbol works for both constituencies in slightly different ways. When Jones sells the movie rights to his saga of upward struggle against the forces of Satan and his lonely coup de grace for freedom and democracy in this sin-loving land, the part should go to (no relation) Tommy Lee Jones.

There are two propositions that keep me away from reducing this episode to just another example of hate speech or civil disobedience, on the analogy of the Klan marching through Skokie in 2000 or burning draft cards in 1969 or the Haymarket riots of 1886.   The difference may not be immediately obvious, or compelling, but it is a difference.

If Mr Jones had staged his execution of the Koran, “a work of the Devil,” in 1969, it would have been the shot heard round Lake City, Florida.  No one would have cared; few people would have known.  It would have the resonance of a wooden clapper.  As a Florida boy myself, I can easily imagine a woman outside the Lake City Winn-Dixie store saying, “He burned the whut?” But it did not happen in 1969.  It happened in the age of rapid information-transfer, and sudden celebrity–the age and space that Jones is counting on to raise him from evangelical crackerdom to national guru.  I see Dancing with the Stars down the road for this guy and I pray that his partner will be someone named Aisha.

The Amendment we depend upon to protect us from slander while, at the same time, defending our right to blaspheme, criticize, oppose, peaceably assemble and demonstrate was carved at a time when America was relatively isolated from the foreign effects of domestic action.  Even though the polemic was hot and strong throughout the pre-Revolutionary era (one of the reasons the First Amendment exists at all) reaction was slow because news traveled that way.

I think there is something qualitatively different about Jones and the way he does business, and it has to be acknowledged. There is something different about what constitutes “imminent and likely lawless action” in an age where cause and effect have been reduced to days, sometimes seconds.  And one day the courts will have to deal with it–but not yet. Jones’s only miscalculation in this case was that the media wasn’t paying attention to him anymore, so he had to try doubly hard to get the word out.  He was duly abetted by Hamid Karzai.

As to preserving free speech against the odds of too much sway in the direction of controlling it: As a Christian triumphalist, Jones would like nothing more than an America in which the very thing he was permited to do could not be done.  A sheer increase of the Terry Joneses of this country–among people who now see his action as noble–would lead to a Christian state wherein it would, at a minimum, be illegal to burn a Bible or insult a man of the cloth, or more precisely, the evangelical cloth. Atheism in Jonestown, USA? As likely as a women’s right to education act under the Pakistani Taliban.

No one realistically thinks that this kind of America is coming, least of all me.  But it is an interesting test of priorities that condemning Jones’s action as being fundamentally opposed to the cardinal American values of freedom and tolerance  should be immediately seen as a complaint about hypothetical “infringement” of Mr Jones’s rights, without any equivalent assessment of what he did and the way he did it.  –I’m reluctant to mention the one muddled response that compared Jones’s burning of the Koran to the 1933 (fol.) book burnings in Nazi Germany because, frankly, I couldn’t understand the premise.

The way the Rev did it was to make sure that Muslims were paying attention.  When he streamed the “trial” and execution of the book, with some hapless imam from Dallas acting as a defense atttorney, he dressed in judge’s robes.  He streamed the proceedings with Arabic subtitles.  Those are the facts; I am guessing, but cannot know for sure, that he was also trying to convey an impression of “authenticity” to the web-viewers, as though to suggest this was a real trial.  Given the limited sophistication of the Arab street, this would not have been a difficult thing to do.

So, this was not an act confined to the churchyard; this was a belligerent act designed to do harm, to substantiate his weird metaphysic about Islamic violence, and he was right: harm was done. People are dead. or should I say, more people are dead.  Now to search “Koran Burning” on Youtube will link you to dozens of copycat rituals going on all over the world.  Congratulations, Mr Jones: you are a success because this is how we now measure success, the degree of lunacy that a single image can generate.

After further thought, however, I have decided that Mr Jones is really being judged by the wrong criteria.  His case falls between free exercise and free speech, and so it falls between the stools.  Holmes’s aphorism about “clear and present danger,” and all later refinements, are not going to help us with the Terry Jones case, unless he magically appears in Kandahar and starts shooting Muslims.  Even then, alas, he would likely find supporters back home and die a hero.

I’ve asked a number of respondents if they think Jones is “guilty” of anything other than bad judgement.   Law and ethics are not only two different areas but fields that often collide on principles. If law does not help us with this one, is there a moral position that can be condemned–or vindicated?  Is Mr Jones “just a cracker” and his actions as predictable, and thus as unremarkable, as the predictable response of angry young men in Afghanistan?  After all, we have become accustomed, to the point of dozing off, to images of angry, mainly young Muslim men all over the Islamic world.

I don’t fully understand the pathology of their anger, but I do know that the symbolic respository for what they are willing to die and to kill to defend is the Koran. I also think I know that lectures on God’s existence or their foolish and superstitious ways are not going to get their attention.

Laïcité: The Radical Secular Imperative

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You need to join us. Now. You need to take a stand against the deadening of the American brain. You need to do this whether you think America is already brain dead, or if you are an American worrying about just how much life is left in you.

The Europeans have long had a word for what radical secularity is, at its heart: it is based on challenging the prerogatives of religion in society–something Americans have long thought their First Amendment made it unnecessary for them to do. It is called laïcité in France, and sometimes gets translated into English as laicity: the rise of the common woman and man (the laity) who were not in clerical orders nor members of the aristocracy in cahoots with the Church. It goes back to the time of the Revolution (theirs, not ours) when the Catholic Church was greatly diminished in power and prestige among members of the third estate–ordinary people.

I’m happy to call it secularism, as long as we understand it in the most radical sense of that word. The term laïcité has the advantage of naming the thing after what it is: people. And when you get down to it, it is ordinary people (not bishops and theologians) who have suffered most at the hands of religion–and still do. It has the disadvantage of being French in a country where some states still serve Freedom Fries, though they have forgotten why.

It is amazing to me that the Catholic Church is still standing. We now know that the Church of Rome has used its prestige and its illegitimate claim to be the protector of conscience to tamp down the fires of outrage over the rape of children. Children were raped in Boston. In New York. In Brussels. In Dublin. In Frankfort. In Philadelphia. In Sydney and Toronto. We are just beginning [see note below] to get a sense of the scale, but on the basis of what we know–the number of priests and children involved and the inaction of the Church to stop the abuse–the crimes can only be compared to multiple serial killers being permited to go about their routine with the police watching and winking.

It is amazing to me that Islam has not petitioned the World Court in the Hague for forgiveness from the international community. There is no central authority to lodge such a petition, of course, and no desire to lodge one–which is part of the problem: The death in Pakistan last week by assassins who became national heroes overnight was conducted with the بركة of a dozen radical clerics, each claiming legitimate authority to issue licenses to kill in the name of God. I am not very interested in social explanations of why such killing occurs. I want to know why a liberal West is so willing to accept the rationale that it occurs because the liberal West created radical Islam. Or why the United Nations can pass a resolution declaring that the “defamation of religion” is a violation of international human rights, a premise eerily like the Blasphemy laws that led to the murders of Shahbaz Bhatti and Salman Taseer. I am saddened that innocent soldiers have to die to make a point about living without fear or reprisal and in the hope of freedom, sadder still that the atrocity of religious violence usually ends up not merely short of its objective but in the rubble of another Muslim household.

I am outraged at the religious sources of ignorance. Gallup 2010 says that only 39% of Americans “believe” in evolution while a further 36% have “no opinion,” a conclusion almost as stupefying as the first. And while the religion marketplace is competitive, and while church attendance is slightly down, Pew Research suggests that between 80 and 85% of Americans are either “religious” or “very religious.”

They are also anti-science and pro-ignorance: Abortion is not a science question, but a healthy 52% (Gallup) oppose it, exceeded by the 57% (Rasmussen, 2010) who oppose embryonic stem cell research because opponents think it involves killing babies for their brains.

I am angry at the teaching of absolute falsehood and mythology as truth, whether it is put across as history or geology or geography. The entropic principle in American democracy has always been the insistence that there are two sides to every story, and then applying this notion to facts.

There are not two sides to facts. It is self-evidently a crime against reason to tell “learners,” as we like to call the innocent these days, that a fact has the same epistemological value as an opinion or a perspective, thereby encouraging them to think that things that really are just opinions, like religious doctrines, have higher status than facts.

Scientists know this about facts or they could not do their work. You cannot treat cancer like a cold. There is nothing to be said for the idea you can get to the moon in a cardboard box. But there are still people in postions of authority over mind and heart, some of them passing laws on our behalf, who believe the world was created in six days and that Jesus walked on water and ascended into heaven. There is no doubt that this did not happen: there are not two sides to it.

Neither is there any merit in the idea that God created marriage for the procreation of the human race. The human race was doing very nicely without the god of the Hebrew tribes before the story was invented, and the Church cared almost nothing about the religious value of marriage until the 12th century. Procreation is a fact. Interpretations of its sanctity or exclusivity are opinions.

This list could be extended, should be extended. What these cases have in common is not only that they offend against our intelligence and perhaps basic sense of decency–a phrase that needs to be revived–but that religion is implicated in all of them. There is no secular child abuse scandal. There are very few secular suicide bombers. Among seculars facts are, in the main, valued and Darwin is permitted to speak. This doesn’t mean that secular women and men have not done evil things, but they have done them through malice, not in the name of secularity. In cases where the State simply replaced God, as in Soviet Russia, the motivation was essentially religious.

I am not happy to say Leave the dims to their dimness and let’s get on with converting the world to atheism. For one thing, that is not going to work. For another, we see what happens when the religiously craven are left to their own devices. It is a question of how long before they come knocking at your door and require you to have a Bible or a Quran in your house—just like pistol packers who want you to pack a pistol, too.

And I am also not prepared to say, “We need to start talking to each other, find out where the other side is coming from.” I have limited faith in the powers of this conversation. There comes a point, and we have reached it, that to indulge religious illiteracy is the same as saying there are two sides to every fact. But we can bring with us people with sincere, peaceable religious commitments who are nonetheless equally committed to secularity. That is not dialogue; it is common cause. It can be carried on with kindred spirits still living and long dead.

It may be true that atheism, agnosticism, interfaith understanding ,and various interest domains share with the Laïcité an interest in opposing and—to be perfectly militant—defeating the repugnant positions I have mentioned here. But the battle line has to be made up of people who see the world in a particular fashion and who do not think that the truth that constitutes knowledge of the world is negotiable. That is what Laïcité is all about. That is what a radically secular worldview requires.

All of the people who do these things, who believe these things, who teach these things are terrorists, not only the ones who throw bombs. The Catholic Church has committed acts of terror against children. Ultra-conservative protestants continue to promote intellectual feebleness among millions of people worldwide. Significant numbers of Muslims have adopted an anti-rational posture toward their domestic critics and towards all outsiders, especially in the west. That is the world we live in.

Slogans about there being No God (Live with it), about “Being good” without God–or about it being possible to be loving, gentle, and kind without God, besides being laughably obtuse, are almost hopelessly irrelevant to the problems we face. They shift the emphasis from causes to the moral rectitude of unbelief, a different matter, a game being played on a different field. Atheism and Goodness without God may be perfectly worthy subjects of discussion over coffee, among friends. But they are not relevant to this discussion, which is how very badly a great many people who believe in God are behaving. The problem requires a great many more than the 16% of Americans who aren’t especially religious to solve, since the religious ennui the statistic may betoken is not the same as laïcité–a radical secularity.

I hope that those of you interested in joining a cause, an organization, and a movement that is both targeted and appropriate to what’s happening in real time on the world stage will join the Institute for Science and Human Values. We affirm that there are non-religious solutions to the problems we face. We affirm that human beings shape the future by shaping appropriate values in the present.

Join us in promoting the cause of a radically secular future—one where there are not two sides to every fact.

______________________

Note on Roman Catholic Abuse Scandal:
The 2004 John Jay Report commissioned by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) was based on surveys completed by the Roman Catholic dioceses in the United States. The surveys provided information from diocesan files on each priest accused of sexual abuse and on each of the priest’s victims to the research team, in a format which did not disclose the names of the accused priests or the dioceses where they worked. The dioceses were encouraged to issue reports of their own based on the surveys that they had completed.

The team reported that 10,667 people in the US had made allegations of child sexual abuse between 1950 and 2002 against 4,392 priests (about 4% of all 109,694 priests who served during the time period covered by the study). One-third of the accusations were made in the years 2002 and 2003, and another third between 1993 and 2001. “Thus, prior to 1993, only one-third of cases were known to church officials,” says the report.

Around 81% of the victims were male; 22.6% were age 10 or younger, 51% between the ages of 11 and 14, and 27% between the ages to 15 to 17 years.

The Secular City

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Someone once defined a puritan as a person who lives with the gnawing suspicion that his next door neighbor is having more fun than he is. When you get right down to it, what the religious conservative hates about American democracy is his own suspicion that his neighbor isn’t as Christian as he is.

It is a lie propagated by wishful-thinking conservatives that America is a Christian country. But it would also be a lie to say that this country was founded by atheists. It wasn’t.

It’s also untrue to say that America was founded by humanists. In the eighteenth century, the term had already come to describe attitudes associated with classical idealism, reborn during the Renaissance–especially the Italian branch of the movement. Nothing frustrates the modern humanist more than to be told that both Erasmus, a pretty devout Catholic, and Calvin, a pretty devout Protestant were not just humanists but typify their respective branches of the humanist Zeitgeist of the sixteenth century.

America’s founders weren’t humanists, though they were fair examples of humanistic learning–especially Franklin and the polymathic, almost disgustingly smart Jefferson. If anything, both were too skeptical of religion to have been good humanists in the renaissance sense of the word.

But for the most part the founders of the Republic were secular. When they trusted in God it was simply a homonym for trusting in themselves–a real “All others pay cash” approach to the slogan that finally adorns our currency.

They knew what they were doing when they rejected Hobbes and reinvented Locke’s theory of government.

Secularism and self-reliance (the word Emerson assigned an almost mystical value to) granted them the ability to move in less than a century from the narrow religiousness of the Bay Colony puritans and the cavaliers of Virginia Anglicanism to a new position that would be neatly summarized in the idea of “toleration.” If there was ever a miracle in American history, it was that.

The British Parliament had passed a completely useless Act of Toleration in 1689 when the Plymouth Colony was only sixty five years old (Boston was founded in 1630, ten years after Plymouth. Harvard in 1636, a century and a half before the United States and, remarkably, over a century before most Oxford colleges).

The Act did not extend its tenderness to Roman Catholics or non-Trinitarians (thus not Jews or Unitarians) and excluded them from university education and political office. It is why,vestigially, to this day, a special act of Parliament would be required for an heir to the throne to be anything but a Protestant. Perhaps even to marry one.

Only in the nineteenth century did England get round to upgrading the 1689 law; it was beat at the hustings by the Maryland Toleration Act of 1649 that mandated religious freedom for anyone living in the colony, though it was a bit tough, in British fashion, on anyone denying the divinity of Jesus. The penalty for that was death. Hardly a model for the First Amendment.

The turning point for American law was the belief that individual liberty entailed freedom of conscience. That meant that colonial protections of particular religious practices–Baptists in Rhode Island, Anglicans in North Carolina, Catholics in Maryland–gave way to a more spacious principle based not on the status quo of religious numbers but to the belief that conscience is more sacred than deity.

John Adams

That principle gets enshrined in the Virginia Statute of 1786, “That no man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever, nor shall be enforced, restrained, molested, or burthened in his body or goods, nor shall otherwise suffer on account of his religious opinions or belief; but that all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinion in matters of religion, and that the same shall in no wise diminish enlarge, or affect their civil capacities.”

Thomas Jefferson wrote it; James Madison oiled its way through the Virginia Legislature.

In the long preamble, Jefferson jabs for the idea that argument and debate are the only tests of religion opinion, and that religious tests insult the divine gift of reason:

“Whereas Almighty God hath created the mind free; that all attempts to influence it by temporal punishments or burthens, or by civil incapacitations, tend only to beget habits of hypocrisy and meanness, and are a departure from the plan of the Holy author of our religion, who being Lord both of body and mind, yet chose not to propagate it by coercions on either, as it was in his Almighty power to do; that the impious presumption of legislators and rulers, civil as well as ecclesiastical, who being themselves but fallible and uninspired men, have assumed dominion over the faith of others, setting up their own opinions and modes of thinking as the only true and infallible tests.”

Let kings, tyrants, and all Gods but Reason beware.

It was a short step to the concise language of the First Amendment to the Constitution. To paraphrase: Congress is not in the religion business. It is not in the anti-religion business. Public institutions funded by government may not be in the religious business. And politicians who curry public favor by suggesting otherwise walk a very fine line, fraught with the danger of betraying the republican and secular values that resulted in American democracy.

I assume that the absurdist “reading” of the Constitution at the opening of 112th Congress of the United States included a reading of the Bill of Rights. But of course, like their reading of the Bible, the Conservative Christian reading of the text made little sense to its readers. For example: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” It took until the Illiterate Century, our own, for a Supreme Court to say that this meant a private citizen is entitled to carry a concealed weapon.

And this is why secularism, far more than disbelief in God, is considered threatening by religious conservatives. Mere atheism has no political implications. None. Secularism on the other hand requires the religious conservative to defend the proposition that belief in God is an entitlement in a nation where that opinion is, basically, outlawed by writ even they want to consider sacred.

Secularism is more than a recipe for religious toleration, however. And both religious persons and non-religious persons need to realise that. Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Benjamin Franklin, and the obsessively odd John Adams would not have been atheists. It is a waste of intellectual time to think that they were or would have been.

But they would vomit at the obsequious language of both Democrats and Republicans–especially at the necessity of having to proclaim religious faith in order to qualify as a serious contender for political office.

The secular factor in American democracy is not only on trial at home; it is precisely why American democracy is a hugely unlikely option abroad–especially in the Middle East. More’s the pity that we have fought wars to export it, without recognizing its non-exportable features as a philosophy that does not trust in God at all. I do not know what is sweeping through the Middle East at the moment. But I know it is not the Spirit of ’76.

American secularism does not enshrine any opinion or movement. In fact, it exposes the reality than any opinion or movement that cannot be argued and reasoned deserves to be treated, like the divine right of kings, as a new superstition.

It’s important to realize that while the American experiment in secularity came from a time when gentlemen and ladies were questioning core religious doctrines like the divinity of Jesus, it also came from circles that had a quiet belief in the divinity of reason.

To the extent we share something like a demythologized vision of that faith in ourselves, we are secularists.

To the extent we don’t–or ascribe it to the power of an unseen God to help us out of our misery–we are mere partisans, peasants to our passions and private agendas.

Arrest This Man

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And his little Dove, too. With predictable ghoulish clarity, the American media is goading the Reverend Terry Jones to follow through with his Koran bonfire on September 11th, while politicians (both kinds) and religious leaders of all stripes are urging him not to do it.

Of course, there is no story if he doesn’t do it–and media hate that. And if it’s called off he will be called a coward for capitulating to the “supporters” of a religion he has t-shirted as “of the Devil.” Jones has stated that if Jesus was alive he would light the first match. And he has said, as all cultic leaders do, that a gunfight with the police wouldn’t faze him and his followers: “We’re prepared to die for what we believe in.” Echoes of another Jones, another catastrophe.

Mr Jones is all the usual cultic suspects rolled into one. He is a gay-basher, a hate-monger, and a crusader for the old time religious value of intolerance.

He founded the Dove World Outreach Center as a front for his hate-inducing sermons and grandstanding.

He is a Christian Triumphalist with a clear millennial vision, which he saw previewed on Septmber 11, 2001: the first fiery signs that the Antichrist was entering the world. He considers the pastors and priests organizing “prayer” and loaves of bread protests around him “lily livered Christians” for failing to stand up to the the threat of Islam. –Although it is not clear why, if Islam betokens the end-time, Mr Jones would want to oppose it: in his theology anyway, it’s the last act in a very big plan wrought by God himself.

And what do Gainesville officials do? Besides praying and dissuading, they have denied Mr Jones a burn permit. Perhaps the next recourse might have been for him to order a hundred porta-potties to the parking lot of the Church?

But no, Jones says the burning will go ahead as planned. There’s something, as every Klansman knows, about a fire.

Meanwhile, we are all missing the point and the President of the United States is missing an opportunity. The same president who personally intervened in a squabble between a fumbling Harvard professor and a Cambridge cop when the former locked himself out of his house is staying away from this one.

Despite the fact that the country is in wars with Muslims all over ther world, both hot and cold, and that the burning of Korans is likely to be seen as the most vicious symbolic attack on the Islamic faith since Urban II called the First Crusade.

There will be riots, there will be murders and bombings, there will be dead Americans and others. All because one undereducated self-ordained cowpoke took refuge in the First Amendment’s free expression clause.

Loaves of bread, prayer marches and picket signs–“good religion” vigorously expressed–are not going to have an effect on this donkey of a man so deeply out of touch with modern religion that he may as well be Osama bin Laden’s cavemate.

Mr President: You are a lawyer. You know the Constitution. You know the difference between hate speech and incitement. You know the line is thin, but that once it is crossed the damage cannot be undone.

I’ve seen it with my own eyes. During my time in Pakistan, in 2009, the mere rumour that some Christians had “desecrated” pages of the Koran led to disaster.

Four women, a man and a child died as Muslim militants set fire to Christian houses in the town of Gojra. Two men died later of gunshot wounds. Houses were burned and streets strewn with debris as people fired at each other from rooftops. There were bloody riots throughout the country. Then it was “revealed” that the rumours which led to the unrest were false and probably started by some children.

But Mr Jones is real. He will use real matches and real (if doubtless inexpensive) copies of the Koran. This very dangerous man has publically announced his intention to flout the law and to cause riots, even gunfights. He has already cried fire–real fire–in the crowded theater of global religious tension.

Mr President: Arrest this man. Do not turn this discussion over to political theorists, Constitutional talking-heads and interfaith tweeps.

If the dignity of Henry Louis Gates was important to you and the chance to be seen defusing a “racial situation,” this is infinitely greater and a thousand times potentially more harmful.

Arrest him without delay. Deploy the National Guard. Surround the Church. Be seen to be doing something courageous in this instance.

Your top general, not known for emotionalism, has already announced the consequences on the ground in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan. But it will spread–you should pardon the expresion–like wildfire. You will have let it happen.

You will be criticized, but your critics won’t prevail in this argument: you are trying to prevent loss of life. You are not trying to save Korans.

If you do not arrest this man, Christians in Pakistan, Lebanon, and corners of the Islamic world will be in jeopardy. Some will be killed; churches will be torched.

If you do not do this, American-Muslim relations, already lying in the dust will suffer an unimaginable blow. And Muslim Americans will consider you weak and treacherous.

Please, Mr President: show us this man in handcuffs and a U.S. marshall doing his sworn duty before Saturday.

Thank you.

CFI Proves Idiom True!

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The Fine Art of Contradiction

The Center for Inquiry’s Statement on the Ground Zero Controversy

CFI fully supports the free exercise of religion; protecting the rights of believers and nonbelievers is central to CFI’s mission. Accordingly, CFI endorses President Obama’s recent statement reminding the country that Muslim Americans enjoy the same rights as other Americans and should not be treated as second-class citizens. There should be no legal impediment to the placement of an Islamic community center near Ground Zero, just as there should be no legal impediment to the placement of a church, temple, or synagogue near Ground Zero.

Ground Zero Mosque, Winning Plan

Further, CFI laments the effort by some to turn the proposed Islamic center into a political issue. Government officials and candidates for office should not intervene in disputes over the alleged offensiveness of a place of worship. Such conduct violates the spirit, if not the letter, of the Establishment Clause. Government officials should not be deciding who is a “moderate” Muslim any more than they should be deciding who is a “moderate” Christian or Jew.

A number of private individuals have protested the proposed Islamic center. The tone and substance of these protests covers a wide range. Some protesting the Islamic center have raised legitimate questions, but to the extent the objections to the Islamic center mistakenly equate all Muslims with Muslim extremists, CFI condemns them.
CFI maintains that an Islamic center, including a mosque, near Ground Zero, in and of itself, is no different than a church, temple, or synagogue. It is undeniable that the 9/11 terrorists were inspired by their understanding of Islam, and that currently there are far more Islamic terrorists in the world than terrorists of other faiths, but those facts are not relevant to the location of the Islamic center, absent evidence that terrorists are involved in this endeavor, and there is no such evidence.

CFI’s unequivocal support for the legal right of Muslims to place a community center near Ground Zero does not imply that CFI views the new center as an event to be celebrated. To the contrary, CFI is committed to the position that reason and science, not faith, are needed to address and resolve humanity’s problems. All religions share a fundamental flaw: they reflect a mistaken understanding of reality. On balance, CFI does not consider houses of worship to be beneficial to humanity, whether they are built at Ground Zero or elsewhere.

This statement supersedes any prior statement issued by CFI regarding the Ground Zero controversy.

Unofficial Translation

The Ground Zero Mosque (placeholder name) hubub is getting a lot of attention. CFI would like to get a lot of attention because frankly no one pays any attention to what we say anymore. This is the kind of issue we ought to say something about so, here we are.

A couple of days ago we said some silly things, or maybe said things that gave our readers the idea that we approved of religion.

So forget all that and let us try again. Number one, however: We do not like religion, or as we like to call it “theism.” Theism is evil, but that doesn’t mean you should not tolerate it. Just because your neighbor is a pervert doesn’t mean you should burn down his house, right? This is our core philosophy about such things. Violence doesn’t solve anything. Ridicule does.

As a free speech advocacy group, we support the right of anyone to say anything. We have even taken the lead in being offensive and insulting toward religion, just to make our point.

As a super-charged First Amendment Rights organization, we believe that everyone is entitled to practice their faith as they see fit. Or not to practice any faith. Commitment is the real issue. We also think the jury is out on Mormons,especially the sexual multitaskers, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and other annoying groups, but they’re not in the news right now, are they?

Some people think that because we spend most of our time ridiculing religion that we would oppose building the Ground Zero Mosque (placeholder name). They have another think coming. We are full of surprises and this is just one of them. Politicians should butt out and not try to politicize this. That’s for groups like ours. This isn’t about who loves America most. It’s about who’s right.

Basically we believe that a mosque is like a porn shop. You may not like what it sells but a guy’s got a right to make a living. Or it is like your evil neighbor’s house. You choose the best analogy.

Like we said before, Islam is just another religion. You can’t really draw any conclusions from the fact that there are maybe a zillion times more extremists in Islam than in any other religion. If there were a zillion more porn shops in Lincoln, Nebraska than Peoria, Illinois, what would you conclude? Exactly. That reminds us of a joke: How many altar boys does it take for a bishop to change a lightbulb?

Another thing we think is that Muslims need exercise. Not just driver’s-ed, weight- training with heavy explosives, running, and diving but maybe pilates, tae kwon do, twenty minutes on a non-exploding treadmill, maybe a few laps in a warm pool with a Michael Bublé track playing in the background. We think the Community Center attached to the Ground Zero Mosque (placeholder name) might be a good idea. Maybe a small side chapel, the way Catholics have their tabernacles or wtf nowadays, but all the rest of the space for exercise and International Menu Nights–focus on veg.

CFI looks forward to joining the residents of the Ground Zero Mosque at its groundbreaking along with people of faith, people of no faith, people with yellow teeth and people who are just passing by. Like all freedom-loving Americans, we celebrate our differences, along with people of colour and people of no colour.

We celebrate the fact that our Constitution gives us the right to paint our crappy house purple on a street of well-maintained Victorian clapboard whites. We believe we have the right to insult or not to insult and to be offended or not to be offended. We’re not too sure about carrying sidearms to public rallies. But we’re working on a position paper and you can bet it will be awesome.

The key thing is consistency.

“Drawing Muhammad”? Free Speech and Fake Goods

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In general, I am in favor of free speech. The sole exception being when my sixteen year old daughter talks through re-runs of Seinfeld or Frasier.

I have even gone on (nuanced) record as saying that no one should be put to death for trying to represent the Prophet of Islam. My final verdict on the Danish cartoon debacle a few years ago is that the Danes aren’t very funny. No wonder Hamlet never smiled.

Not that anyone has the foggiest idea what Muhammad looked like, making the idea of “caricature” about as useful as painting Moses with eye shadow and ringlets. Oh wait: he probably did use eye shadow and have ringlets, at least until he discovered he was a son of Israel and not a prince of Egypt. My bad.

In general however: it is a bad idea to threaten someone for disparaging your religion. Especially when the disparagement in question does not even rise to the level of sophisticated satire, let alone to a level where it should be a test case in free speech.

I personally favor a United Nations Commission for Insult and Indignation (there’s one for everything, anyway) to vet all cases where insult or defamation has been alleged. The Commission (I am glad to offer my services as its first director) would distinguish between (1) “really good satire,” (2) “disgusting and unfunny ridicule,” (3) “pathetic attempt at humor”, and (4) “potentially blasphemous and insulting, even to bystanders.” It would take a unanimous vote of the Commission for anything to achieve level (4), which would require the offenders to dress up like altar boys and spend a weekend in a rectory.

I don’t have a category for “literary” works considered to be blasphemous but apparently the Nobel Committee does, which is why Salman Rushdie will never win the prize for Literature.

All of this is to say, that the rudderless and publicity-starved “Center for Inquiry” is at it again. And (according to the legal puritans in Buffalo) it’s all about free speech.

In its latest attempt to appear useful, CFI comes to the unsolicited defense of two improbable offenders: South Park and a contest to “Draw Muhammad” that never really got off the ground.

Religions have traditionally bristled when their core doctrines have been lampooned. South Park‘s spin is usually tasteless (Who doesn’t hum “Mr Hanky the Christmas Poo” during the holy season? Who can forget the vision of the Future in the Go God Go episode, when Cartman can’t wait three weeks until the Wii console is available and is transported into an atheist future where Richard Dawkins has become a messiah?)

When South Park “does” religion, it can be sweepingly irreverent and occasionally poignant. It is sometimes offensive,as Comedy Central discovered when it received veiled threats from an Islamic organization based in New York over its 200th episode where Muhammad is “represented” as being inside a bear suit.

The episode has attracted attention in the blogosphere, with young Muslim South Park fans expressing reactions ranging from “disappointment” to anger and frustration. A viewer named Bilal el-Houri says that Muslims should take the episode and the furore as a wake-up call, and instead of grunting, boycotting and screaming should be asking themselves why these depictions are now standard.

The so-called threat comes from a certain Abu Talhah al Amrikee and is pretty dull: “It’s not a threat, but it [violence] really is a likely outcome. They’re going to be basically on a list in the back of the minds of a large number of Muslims. It’s just the reality.” The show’s producers didn’t know that was a likely outcome? Really?

Good satire is supposed to annoy the satiree–otherwise no game. And it is merely masturbatory for a secular advocacy group to enter the picture with a typically onerous lecture on how South Park has a right to be offensive. We know that. That’s why we watch it. Not because we see every episode as a cannon shot for free expression.

Besides, some young bloggers thought the South Park episode was less funny than it was deliberately provocative, a crass bet on a sure-fire reaction to any attempt to insult the Prophet. Wrote Sher Zeinab, “2 b honest 200 episode wasnt funny at all to me!” She then added, “Bringing Mohammad back! when you know it is a sensitive issue […] seems to me southpark is running out of ideas!!! that angle just brought everything down.”

In other words, South Park got what it wanted, or maybe more than it bargained for, with Episode 200–the same way you might get a faceful if you tell fat Mrs Murphy, your annoying neighbor, a series of “Yo mama is so fat” jokes. Are you really going to the cops when she tells you to desist or she’ll sik her Rottweiler on you?

Taste and discretion are not essential considerations if you just want to be tasteless and indiscreet, but the question of motive does arise. Free Speech? Solidarity? Puhleez. Save it for real cases of censorship.

That brings me back to my drum. Surely if secularists and atheists have the right to satire and what they are self-describing as “blasphemy,” offended parties have the right to bristle. Listen, atheists: no such thing as a free ride. Your right to deliver insult is matched by my right to be offended and to call you a tasteless cur. No good whining about your right to be dull and overbearing when I do–not even when I say–hyperbolically of course–that you need a good thrashing for your lack of manners and civility.

If you think the pope molests little boys, as a winning cartoon in the CFI Cartoon Cavalcade suggests, then be prepared for the Catholic Church to cry foul.

When Arabs produce cartoons of Jews eating Palestinians, prepare for the Jews to disagree.

Sharon as Cronus

And if Muslims cringe and mumble threats when they see their religion pilloried on South Park or by a desperate Seattle News cartoonist looking for spin (bad idea after a bad night at the bar?), please don’t try to sell this to me as real jewels: they aren’t.

They’re publicity stunts, nothing more. Not only that, but in a world where religious emotions are running high on our crowded planet they are stunts that raise the temperature–like yelling fire in a crowded theatre, nudge nudge.

It has been a long time since an atheist was burned at the stake for his unbelief or a philosopher roasted on a spit for being an Epicurean. Not so long for Jews, Buddhists, Muslims, and even Catholics. Given a complicated recent history I’m not sure that South Park‘s post-religious take on heaven or its enviable skill in stirring the pot of religious sensitivities is the place for a serious meeting of minds on the question of free expression and tolerance.

The right to criticism and insult is, surely, the low bench mark in what the doctrine of free expression is all about. The principle does not command the assent of the offended: it condones vigorous disagreement and defense. And to call every case of disagreement and even “veiled threats” and overreaction an attack on the Constitutional guarantee of free speech reaches so far beyond common sense and sound judgment that it is difficult to know whether the atheist Lilliputians are really really afraid Gulliver is trampling on their rights or are simply inventing him to scare others.

Cartoon Cavalcade! CFI Protects Free Expression

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[I read somewhere that the Center for Inquiry Blasphemy Contest, since redubbed the Blasphemy Rights Contest, has come round again as part of its super-popular “Campaign for Free Expression.” “It made me nostalgic for this 2010 piece, so i woke it up.  rjh]

Ladies and Germs. No, Really. Heh, heh.

It is not often that we have an opportunity to salute the defenders of free speech. Why should tonight be any different.

Badda bing.

And who says free expression can’t be funny?

The Center for Inquiry, that’s who.

“As part of its contribution to the Center for Inquiry’s Campaign for Free Expression, the Council for Secular Humanism invited professional and amateur artists to submit their sharpest, cleverest, and most ingenious creations touching on that most sensitive subject: religion.”

Can it only be yesterday that the Center was awarding prizes for slogans like “Faith is no reason.” Yes it could.

I have taken some heat on this site for claiming that atheists qua atheists are not especially funny. Now I have proof.

I’d rather have pudding. Badda bing.

When atheism goes on the attack it usually doesn’t know where to aim.

Whaddya do when you don’t know where to aim.

That’s right, Sally: Aim low.

Whaddya call an army of freethinkers? Nothing, they won’t come when you call.

So, in keeping with the noble tradition of failed stand-up comedy of a genre that would not even place in a college newspaper competition:

Number One:

Comment from prizegivers: “A stinging indictment of the Catholic Church’s pedophilic priest scandal that allows absolutely no room for the predictable apologetic defense. Left me laughing and wincing at the same time!” Not sure how an organization that prides itself on truth, justice and The American way (“It’s a bird, it’s a plane. Naw, it’s only Father Flaherty committing suicide.”) can get by with stinging pre-trial cartoon indictments. But boy, could I be wrong!

Number Two:

Prizegiver: “Dramatic art of the empty-eyed victim who has fallen prey to what Richard Dawkins calls religion’s ‘virus of the mind.’ Employs the over-the-top hype of a B movie advertising billboard to make its point. Good use of contrast and color. Scary!” Masterfully objective. CFI uses “science and reason,” and as we all know has discovered both the God gene and the Religion virus, so this is scary indeed. Unless…

And three:

CFI Judge: “A sweeping commentary on the negative effects of religion on society- from law, to science, to war, to culture.” This shows how little I know about cartoons. I thought this was incredibly stupid and confused, kind of the opposite of sweeping and stinging.

There was also an amateurs section for the “free expression” cartoons, the most incisive of which is this:

The prize-giver said he “laughed out loud at this one.”

I have to admit, I didn’t, mainly because John’s arm is on backwards and he’s going to throw the rock on the ground.

Hilarious, and worth every penny in prize money.

The Church’s Right to Choose

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Bishop Tobin

The edict of the Roman Catholic Bishop of Rhode Island, Thomas Tobin, denying Patrick Kennedy the right to receive communion in his Church is the latest evidence of the Catholic Church’s irrelevance in contemporary ethical discussion. It is sacramental blackmail, demanding that a Catholic legislator suspend judgment and conscience in order to promote the interests of his Church above the interests of the women and men, Catholic and not, who elected him to office. Worse, it ratifies the dark suspicions of fifty years ago when non-Catholics wondered out loud whether the dogma of the church rather than the principles of secular democracy would govern the decision-making of a Catholic president. Oddly enough, it is the Church itself rather than any Catholic politician that has renewed and perhaps answered the question.

In 1960 everyone able to vote in my Catholic family voted for JFK because Catholics (like most Jews and African Americans) were Democrats. Catholics believed in the Trinity, going to confession, the rosary, and the special license of nuns to inflict pain on adolescent knuckles.

On Sundays they were treated to hideous renditions of Mozart and Palestrina by undertrained choirs with shaky voices and priests whose anguished faces at a sung Latin mass left no doubt about the existence of Purgatory.

There was a “thing” called Catholic Culture, preserved in parish schools, loosely enforced by diocesan bishops, reinforced by the anti-communist television sermons of Bishop Sheen in Life is Worth Living. Being an American Catholic was easy because your Church and your country had a common enemy, even if no one could quite decide what to do about it. Communism was “evil” to religious America because it was atheism, the finer points of dialectical materialism being lost on the good citizens of St. Paul and Kansas City.

In 1960 John Kennedy wasn’t kidding when he said that, if elected, Rome wouldn’t tell him what to do–the so-called “Protestant Scare.” For most American Catholics, the Vatican was far away (especially for Irish Americans) and the pope had the same status as meatless Fridays: he came with the territory as the price of baptism. But in general the authority of the pope was pretty obscure and the non-existence of satellite television and the internet made his authority more theoretical than real.

There was a picture of John XXIII in my eighth grade classroom, positioned close to the crucifix, close enough to encourage the belief that perhaps he had lived at the same time as Jesus.

Nobody talked about abortion, homosexuality (of the clergy or in relation to marriage rights) or (much, anyway) about divorce, though all of these things were part of a darker culture that we knew about—usually in the form of an “unmarried” aunt who came to Christmas dinner but didn’t go to mass regularly.

Politics was easy because protestants didn’t talk much about these things either. When modern conservatives talk about a “broad moral consensus” missing in American society they are talking mainly about a religious convergence of social-sexual attitudes that existed before 1968, or thereabouts.

That’s when Paul VI spoiled our theory of the non-existence of the pope by publishing Humanae Vitae forbidding Catholics to take advantage of new techniques of contraception—the pill. It was a tough year to be an undergraduate dating a liberal Episcopalian.

From that day on, Catholicism was less and less about frequent communion, the trinity, and the virgin, more and more about hating abortion and strongly disapproving of gays—despite the irony of an emerging pedophile culture in seminaries and rectories.

Sad, that when this consensus broke down, Catholics by and large were forced into an ethical corner– forced to choose between church and conscience, between a kind of laissez faire allegiance to the principles of Catholic teaching and a strangely robust “moral” voice coming from a church in liturgical disarray and sacramental crisis.

All of a sudden, your best religious friends were not the ones who shared your tradition (tradition?) but the ones who agreed with you that abortion is murder, that homosexuality is a sinful, correctable practice, and that sex between loving but unmarried individuals of different sexes is morally wrong.

All of a sudden, the weak voice of faraway Rome and meatless Fridays seemed preferable to the New Church, a church that had decided to take its stand not at the altar but in the bedroom.

But the real problem in all of this is one our culture doesn’t yet have its head around. It is the way in which the Catholic Church has forced some of its most loyal sons and daughters, especially those in political life, to leave home.

No one knows whether, given the same set of moral variables in 1960, John Kennedy would have been the first Catholic president or could have achieved the delicate balance between convincing Catholics his religion mattered and non-Catholics that it didn’t.

But the balance is gone, thanks in part to changing social realities and changed laws and attitudes, and in part to a cultural backlash that hasn’t stopped lashing.

Unlikely as it seems, confronted with a progressive Catholic candidate in 2012, as we had in 2004, the claim of the Church’s non-interference and disinterest in American politics will no longer be convincing. We see that in the brokering of “acceptable” bishop-approved health care legislation in the U.S. Congress. We saw it in the sad final days of Ted Kennedy, in his letter of “qualified” contrition to Benedict XVI. Now we see it in the virtual excommunication–literally, being cut off from the sacrament–of Patrick Kennedy.

It proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that Catholic lawmakers now are expected to apologize to their church for the free exercise of conscience and the right to frame their ideas within the liberal tradition of American politics.

The issue in 1960, when the phrase had everything to do with belief and almost nothing to do with personal ethics, was whether a candidate was “Too Catholic.” For Catholic voters in the future, unless dramatic change occurs in a Church not known for upheaval, the question will be “Catholic enough?”