On Family Guy right now (for those on the east coast), there is an interesting new episode in which Brian is revealed as an atheist and is subjected to attacks, prejudice, and discrimination for it.  It’s good to see a popular show bring up the issue, even if it is brought to an extreme for the entertainment factor.  Unfortunately, there are certain people in our society where the reactions shown on the cartoon are actually not far off from the reality.

Edit:  To not give away too much, it actually ends on a very inspirational (and funny) note.

Every now and again something happens that brings joy into the heart of a nonreligious activist: a bigot is proven as the hypocritical fool he/she is.  Even better when this person is supposed to be a pillar or morality in the religious community, such as Pastor Chris Fox of North Carolina’s Kendalls Baptist Church.  He was caught and then admitted to posting inflammatory rhetoric on the atheist blog unreasonablefaith while claiming to be an atheist.  It was immediately clear that he was no atheist, as his posts consisted of the most stereotypical caricature of the “immoral atheist.”

For instance:

If a man wants to make a women his b****, so be it? So what if you don’t like it, what if I do?

If I want to do something, and my conscience is cool with it, then I can do it. If it’s feed a homeless person, so be it. If it’s kill my neighbor, so be it. I am not bound to any morals.

The preceding comment is so transparently written by someone trying to make atheists look bad I actually laughed a little when I first read it. Pastor Fox only hurt his cause.  Contrary to his original purpose, he proved the point that the stereotypical claims anti-atheist bigots make about the general character of atheists is a lie perpetuated only by the religious that see us as a threat.  If we really thought this way he wouldn’t have to lie and post such comments, would he?  He could just point to one of us.  He couldn’t, because he presumably knows that the truth is that we are no less moral than anyone else, religious or not.

Pastor Fox seems to have forgotten the ninth commandment,  “You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.” (Exodus 20.13)¹?  He also has certainly not read Proverbs recently:

Six things the lord hates;
Seven are an abomination to Him:
A haughty bearing,
A lying tongue
Hands that shed innocent blood,
A mind that hatches evil plots,
Feet quick to run to evil,
A false witness testifying lies,
And one who incites brother to quarrel. (6.16-20)

I think claiming to be someone you’re not certainly falls into the category of hatching evil plots.  This is one of those times it certainly helps me as an activist for atheist rights to be a scholar of religion.  What is better when attacked by religious bigots than to throw their own scripture in their faces after they are exposed as the hypocrites they are.  And people questioned the usefulness of my degree!

It is almost a given in our society that kids should be raised with religion, because if they aren’t they will grow up to be juvenile delinquents, right? Wrong. Wronger than wrong. Not even wrong. The assumption is so bigoted and breathtakingly inane that it doesn’t deserve a debunking, but it gets one nonetheless in this volume, from nonbelievers of all stripes, who show how and why raising children without religion is not only a loving and ethical approach to parenthood, it is an honorable one.
– Michael Shermer

The preceding quote is from the forward to Dale McGowan’s Parenting Beyond Belief: On Raising Ethical, Caring Kids Without Religion, a collection of essays on raising children with a nonreligious, skeptical worldview.  Reasonable, honest atheists would never claim that raising a child with religious belief would by nature cause the child to grow up as a bad person (although some might argue that such belief can lead toward some unfortunate intellectual consequences), as no honest religious person would likewise claim about us.

The dishonest anti-atheist bigots, though, have no such scruples.  They ignore the fact that morals come from many sources, and that religion in practice has no historically valid claim to moral perfection.  That is, considering that the majority of people on our planet are religious to some degree, crime and acts that would be considered “immoral” by the religion’s own standards are still common by those who follow such faiths.  Clearly, being raised with religious belief does not in any way guarantee that one will be a “good person,” however that is defined.
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I consistently see those who attack us personally for daring to exist cry “they were rude to me!” when engaging in discussion or debate with atheists who are fed up with their bigotry. Cry me a river.  Not everyone deserves respect.  In civil society you receive the same level of respect you offer to others.  Those who simply disagree with our rejection of god belief and religion and who want to defend their beliefs by engaging in rational, intelligent discourse should be free to do such without attacks and insults.  We should attack the claims and positions, not the people.  Anti-atheist bigots, on the other hand, deserve no such courtesy.  They start from a position of complete lack of respect and civility.

Do people respectfully respond to racists?  Generally, they don’t.  They are attacked and called what they are – racists.  Religious bigots of any sort deserve no different treatment. It’s clear who has the ethical authority here.  We attack religion and the concept of faith, while they attack us directly.  They call us immoral, bad people, tell us we will burn in eternal hellfire, not due to our actions, but because have happen to not believe in something they do.  They express such bigotry through mean-spirited, disingenuous personal attacks on us – attacking us not for our characters and actions but for what we don’t believe.  They do not deserve civil discourse.  We are simply judging them by their actions which they rationalize with their religion.

Of course, we should be careful to not overdo it and see bigotry or discrimination where it doesn’t exist, such as a group in the opposition, the Catholic League.  Unlike them, though, we actually experience major bigotry and discrimination in the United States.  Not all religious folks are bigots, and they deserve as much respect as anyone else making an argument.  If they are meritless the arguments should be attacked, but not the people.  Bigots will not get such courtesy here, and should not anywhere.  They come into the discourse with nothing but personal attacks, and should be treated in kind.  If they want to be treated with respect, they should be focusing on how they treat others first.

No group fighting for their civil rights has ever preserved them by being nice to and pacifying their most vocal opponents.  This simply gives them more power.  We need to take a hint from all the great rights movements, such as the black civil rights movement, gay rights movement, and women’s suffrage movement, just to name a few.  Are bigots the type of people we should concern ourselves with showing niceness towards?  We need to concentrate our efforts towards those who are important: the progressively religious and the nonreligious who are passive and hide their views.

Are you worried about such rudeness being used against us (”See?  Look at the angry militant atheists!”)?  Don’t respond at all, then.  Religious bigots make themselves look bad all on their own.

The Secular Coalition for America now has the article [.PDF] on their website.

It seems good and fair, until you get to the disgusting  ending.  Paul Starobin ends the article by, to start, repeating the lie constantly stated by anti-atheist bigots: that atheists are “arrogant”, claiming to know all.  This is ludicrous when it is in fact the religious who claim to have divine, incontrovertible knowledge.  When taken at face value, religion causes thinking to stop when looking at the origin of the universe and life with the conversation stopper “god did it.”

Atheists, meanwhile, understand that there is still a lot we have yet to learn, of which we can only learn through the logic, reasoning, and evidence of science.  Starobin attempts to prove his point with an uninformed claim about Darwin so ridiculous I can’t even bring myself to repeat it here.  You can read it for yourself in the article.  Basically, though, he attempts to (badly) refute a claim that atheists supposedly make about what Darwin said.  The problem is that atheists never make such a claim.  In fact, such a claim is exactly contrary to the way atheists who support science generally think.  He can’t find any legitimate criticism of the atheists, so he resorts to ad hominem attacks.

Furthering his ad hominem criticisms, he claims that we have “disdain for the religious as captives to superstitions that only a cretin could accept.”  This is a disgusting bigoted comment straight out of the anti-atheist quotebook.  Even more importantly, it isn’t true.  I have heard atheists levy some criticism on the religious, but I have never heard any atheist who is a good person call someone a “cretin” or anything close, simply due to the fact that they are religious.  We would have to think a lot of people are cretins!

Furthermore, I seriously doubt Mr. Starobin ever heard a single atheist he interviewed ever use such an insulting word when referring to religious people.  It came from his mind, no one else – from the bigotry ingrained in him by our culture that he, despite the strong points of the rest of the article, cannot avoid.  Once again, we see the double standard: that it is okay for others to criticize atheists, as Starobin does in his ending, yet if atheists criticize others we are arrogant and insulting.
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D.C. Voucher Amendment Defeated

On March 4th, I received an Action Alert email from the Secular Coalition for America.  This prompted me to write on the reasons why school vouchers for religious private schools violate the Establishment Clause, and are therefore a violation of the religious liberties of all, both religious and nonreligious.  I got an email again from the Secular Coalition for America.  This time it wasn’t asking for help, it was congratulating us on our success!

March 10, 2009

Congratulations! Today, the Senate defeated an amendment by Sen. John Ensign (R-NV) that would have continued the DC voucher program that enables federally funded religious proselytizing and discrimination.

Because you took a few minutes out of your day to write to your Senators, you helped to stop the continued funding of a program that pays for parents to send their children to private religious schools.

The Secular Coalition for America is proud of you and the fifty-eight U.S. Senators who voted against continuing to fund this program.  To see how your Senators voted, click here.

Please continue to support the work that we do by taking action in the future.

Congratulations again!

The Secular Coalition for America

National Journal Article: “The Godless Rise as a Political Force”

The National Journal has published an article on the growing power of nonreligious political lobbying.  It’s currently only available in the print publication or online to subscribers, so I can’t review it yet.  If you are a subscriber check it out and let me know how it is.  According to the Secular Coalition for America, it will eventually be available on their website.  Until then, they do have a slideshow available, “Faces of the Godless Movement,” with some background audio and images about the movement.

Although we are still a minority worldwide, the numbers of atheists – those who lack belief in a supernatural deity – have been growing at an increasing rate, at least in America. Now, from the latest American Religious Identification Survey from Trinity College, we see exactly how much as of 2008. According to the survey, 1.6% of Americans label themselves as “atheist,” a significant jump of 1.2% since 2001 [.PDF]. Despite this seemingly low percentage, the real number is much larger: 12% are actually atheist based on their stated beliefs (or in this case lack thereof).

Now let’s get into exactly what this means:
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I have seen not only religious bigots, but also other atheists make the ridiculous claim that atheists who speak out against bigotry have a persecution/victim complex.  These “Uncle Tom atheists” (a term I didn’t coin, but love because it describes them perfectly) have internalized the societal view that atheists simply should not speak out, even when they have a legitimate complaint.  One cannot have a victim complex if they are in fact victims of persecution, and atheists clearly are worldwide.

Such persecution may not be as bad as what other groups have gone through physically, as I have discussed in the differences between our movement and the black civil rights movement, but it is horrible culturally.  For social beings, is such social ostracizing not one of the worst forms of persecution possible?  Just being truthful about one’s lack of belief will commonly make others immediately think worse about you, and therefore treat you differently.  Speaking out or “complaining” about such ingrained bigotry is not expressing a persecution complex, but is necessary if this will ever change.  As clearly shown by other movements, such as the gay rights movement, the only path to social change is forcing the issue into the public consciousness.  This is impossible without calling out bigotry, discrimination, ostracizing, and persecutions against atheists wherever we see it.

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I just received an action alert from the Secular Coalition for America, urging us to stop the continuation of federal funding for religious schools through vouchers.  Vouchers are a major problem for church/state separation.  Although not all private schools are religious, the majority of them are affiliated with religious denominations and, as such, include theological instruction.  Many would be hard pressed to name local secular private schools, and may not even be able to name one.  Meanwhile, considering the prevalence of religious schools, it isn’t nearly as difficult to name at least one local private religious school.

According to the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics (see graph below), as of 2005 44% of private schools were Roman Catholic and 37% had other “religious orientation or purpose,” for a total of 81% of private schools being religious.  Although the amount of schools with certain religious affiliations such as Roman Catholic has dropped since 1989, the vast majority of private schools are still religious.  The 1999-2000 Schools and Staffing Survey asked private and public school principals about their school goals.  While the top two goals of public school principals were basic literacy (80%) and academic excellence (70%), the top two goals of private school principals were academic excellence (66%) and religious/spiritual life (64%).

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On Saturday, the New York Times published a commentary from Susan Jacoby, program director of the Center for Inquiry-New York City and author of the best-seller The Age of American Unreason.  In “Keeping the Faith, Ignoring the History,” Jacoby discusses and dismantles the assumption that religious groups being provided taxpayer funds for (supposedly) social services is both constitutional and something that has always been, or should be done.  She questions, as I have consistently here on SDR, that the predominant controversy has been how religious groups use the money they receive, rather than whether religious groups should be given tax payer funds at all.

I’m not going to go into all of my arguments against tax payer funding of religious social services organizations again.  I know when to admit I’ve been beaten; Jacoby presents those and further arguments much better than I ever could.  Read her article and you will get more out of it than I can give you.

Excerpt:

It is truly dismaying that amid all the discussion about President Obama’s version of faith-based community initiatives, there has been such a widespread reluctance to question the basic assumption that government can spend money on religiously based enterprises without violating the First Amendment. The debate has instead focused on whether proselytizing or religious hiring discrimination should be permitted when church groups take public money. This shows how easy it is to institutionalize a bad idea based on unexamined assumptions about service to a greater good.