CAUTION CHURCH AHEAD

Faith Leaders Press Conference in favor of Tolerance and Civility

2012-01-25T12:02:00.005-05:00

Members of the Rhode Island State Council of Churches, lead by Rev. Dr. Don Anderson, speak out in favor of civility and discourse in the aftermath of the decision by a Federal Judge to remove a "prayer banner" from the auditorium wall of Cranston West High School. There is also a call to stop the harassment of Jessica Ahlquist, and a call to reaffirm the principle of separation of church and state and the Constitution of the United States.

Is Public Opinion swinging in Jessica Ahlquist's Favor?

2012-01-22T23:37:00.002-05:00

Got up and checked out the paper: My niece Jessica was on the front page again. But this time, it was different. The paper was running a series of articles, five in all by my count, that were basically in support of Jessica and the ruling in her favor by Judge Lagueux. Check out:

Still a lively experiment

Religion still has a place in schools, says scholar

Mural at Bain removed without fanfare last year

Ex-prayer-mural supporter now advocates removing religious words

Timeline: The school prayer at Cranston West

Judge details how, why he ruled

Also, in a feature called "IN QUOTES THE WEEK THAT WAS" the Providence Journal ran the following:

“Not once in my four years have we been forced to read or say the prayer. Please consider appealing the decision to take down the prayer. … If we’re gonna go down, let’s go down fighting.”

Cranston West Student Council President Patrick McAssey, addressing the School Committee about the controversial prayer banner in his school.

I note this because Patrick McAssey is the student who emailed me and asked me to remove the video of his statement to the Cranston School Committee from last Tuesday night, claiming that his statements were for the School Board only and that as a minor he thought his comments should not be put on YouTube for all to see. I disagreed with his logic, but removed the video because he is a minor and I didn't want to link him forever to words he might regret. But this quote in the newspaper is making me rethink my decision.

Why should I protect someone who makes public comments in a public forum, regardless of their age?

Given the potential for a sudden swing in support for Jessica's position, I've organized a Facebook event to get people out to the next School Committee meeting this coming Wednesday. Here's the link:

Support Jessica Ahlquist at the Cranston School Committee Meeting

I'm hoping to get at least a hundred people to attend.

Meanwhile, Jessica was in Alabama, giving this excellent talk about her experiences:

Roger Williams would have been proud of Jessica Ahlquist

2012-01-21T07:30:00.001-05:00

This morning the Proidence Journal ran an op-ed I wrote in defense of my niece, Jessica Ahlquist entitled, "Roger Williams would have been proud". I'm providing a link and running it here as well.

On January 11th, when word got out that a decision had been made in favor of Jessica Ahlquist concerning the "Prayer Banner" at Cranston West High School, I was in an audience of well over two hundred people at the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University listening to a talk by popular historian John M. Barry concerning the subject of his new book, Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul. Barry spoke of Williams as a man of deep faith, a Puritan and a Calvinist, who nonetheless established a colony in the New World that was, in the guaranteeing of religious liberty to all within its borders, the freest government ever seen in history to that time.

Williams once wrote, "It is the will and command of God, that since the coming of his Sonne the Lord Jesus, a permission of the most Paganish, Jewish, Turkish or Antichristian consciences and worships, bee granted in all Nations and Countries." Williams was adamant in establishing freedom of conscience and freedom of religion for all manner of faiths, and even non faiths. He used the term Antichristian for Atheist because the latter term was relatively new and most likely unknown to him. But William’s intent was clear: People of all faiths and no faith were to be welcomed in Rhode Island.

To that end Williams worked to establish a government in Rhode Island that guaranteed these liberties by helping to draft a charter for the colony that was unique in the world because it contained no mention of God. Furthermore, as Barry says in his book, "It would be [Williams], not Thomas Jefferson, who first called for a 'wall of separation' to describe the relationship of church and state which both he and Jefferson demanded."

This is the awesome history of Rhode Island, and our lasting gift to future generations. The United States Constitution borrowed heavily from Williams, (by way of John Locke and James Madison) for its both its initial construction and its later adoption of the Bill of Rights. It is this legacy of freedom that allowed the Quakers, who were very unpopular with the Puritans of Massachusetts, to settle here, that paved the way for the construction of the Touro Synagogue in Newport, the oldest such building in America, and allowed Rhode Island to become the most Catholic state in the nation.

This state was built on the freedom to believe or disbelieve as your conscience dictates, and the creation of a wall of separation between church and state is the mechanism that protects that freedom.

Jessica Ahlquist was asked about Roger Williams at the Rhode Island ACLU press conference held the very next day. A reporter had been at the same John Barry event I had attended, and he asked, riffing on the title of Barry's book, "I'm wondering if you think [this verdict] goes to the American soul, if you could get heady on us here."

Jessica paused, and said, "Well, I don't necessarily believe in a soul, but if you want to talk about the soul of this country… I think yeah, this [verdict] is exactly what should be happening in America, I think this is what true American values are. This country was founded to be a secular country. We're supposed to keep church and state separate so that people can have their rights and their freedom to choose and I think that this lawsuit is a reflection of that."

The enduring legacy of Roger Williams and Rhode Island can only be preserved if there are people brave enough to take a stand and fight for it. Roger Williams would be proud of Jessica Ahlquist.

Appeal or Vote Them Out a film by Chris Young

2012-01-20T21:21:00.000-05:00

Prayer banner opponent Chris Young has made a movie to support his view that the Cranston School Committee should vote to appeal the ruling in the "prayer banner" controversy. Identified in the movie as "Cranston West Student President" is the kid who asked me to take my video of his statement down from YouTube because he is a minor. I complied because I thought that though he said some pretty dumb things, I had no need to ruin his life over them.

I wonder if the kid knows that Chris Young threw him into his video?

Report from the Cranston School Committee Meeting January 18, 2012

2012-01-19T10:30:00.001-05:00

Even though the "prayer banner" appeal was not going to be discussed by the School Committee, (they were instead going to talk about the school budget, a real success story overshadowed by the banner hysteria) the meeting became a focal point of protest because the committee would be taking public comments on non-agenda items, and of course there is only one non-agenda item anyone wants to talk about.

My Dan Ciora and I arrived at the meeting early. Walking into the school I approached the auditorium and saw a table set up selling tee shirts to raise funds for programs like music and middle school sports that had been cut because the City of Cranston had been facing budget problems. I asked the woman running the table how business had been and found out that very few people had contributed or shown an interest in the table. The huge crowd gathering had already bought tee shirts, to support the appeal of the banner decision, and seemed to have little interest in supporting education.

I put $5 in her collection bucket, all I had on me.

In the corridor outside the auditorium I was approached by Chris Young, a perennial candidate for office and a well known conservative Catholic, who once threw a an anti-abortion DVD at United States Congressman Patrick Kennedy and was promptly "wrestled to the floor, handcuffed and removed from the building by police" according to the Brown Daily Herald. I am therefore wary when he is close. He who offered Dan and I a xeroxed piece of paper with the words "APPEAL OR VOTE THEM OUT" on it. The signs were to be worn by those who wanted the School Committee to appeal the ruling on penalty of losing the next election.

But as Chris Young drew closer, he recognized me as Jessica's uncle and said, "Oh wait, you're the atheists." I smiled and said that we were going to sit on the bride's side of the church.

Inside the auditorium I took a front row seat, set up my camera, and waited.

Other media crews began to arrive and set up their cameras as well. I was recognized by some reporters and approached, but I declined to be interviewed on camera until after the meeting was over, and by that time there had ben enough excitement that they didn't really need me.

I had been attending these events for a while. I attended the second sub-committee meeting formed to deal with the banner, and videotaped the school committee meeting that had made the decision to fight the ACLU, despite all costs. There was one police officer at the first event I attended, two at the second. On this night I counted eight police officers (an unsustainable mathematical progression). At least two officers were there to ensure the safety of Jessica and her Taylor.

Before the committee meeting started, and to ensure that the atheists in the audience knew they were in the minority, a group of about 100 people engaged in singing patriotic and religious songs, and even recited and sang the Lord's Prayer and the Hail Mary. I saw this as a naked attempt to make outsiders and those with a minority opinion feel unwelcome. If the "prayer banner" is really about a historical artifact, why is religious intimidation being used to protect it?

After the School Committee took their places on the stage, Andrea Ianozzi asked everyone to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance. Though I started the camera a little late note that the audience overly emphasizes the "under God" part of the pledge, even as they mumble through the rest.

This is the exact same kind of bullying tactic that Jessica has been exposed to in her home room at Cranston West. If anyone doubts that the students are learning their bad behavior from the adults in the community, watch this video. This use of the pledge undermines the very reason for having a pledge in the first place. They say "one nation indivisible" but neatly divide the nation into "us" and "them" with their behavior.

It was a sickening display, and a perfect reason to get "under God" out of the Pledge. It was not placed there to unite the country, it was placed there to let those who do not believe in God know that they are a minority with less rights and less importance than the rest of society.

After the School Committee finished some actual, important business on the school budget, the floor was opened to public comments. Per tradition, students are allowed to speak first, on agenda or non-agenda items. The first two students were pro-banner, and urged an appeal. Then Taylor Grenga, a classmate of Jessica Ahlquist, spoke. After she finished, she was booed.

Superintendent Nero said "when they asked me today in the media, I aid we have not set a good example." He admonished the entire community, not just those present. Note also that when Jessica approached the podium, she was addressed by name without having to identify herself. I point this out because I have heard some criticism of her that suggests she is full of herself for assuming that she is famous enough to be recognized. Not the case, as should be obvious. Also, at no point was she gloating here. She simply gave her opinion, and moved on.

After the student comments, the floor was opened to those who wished to speak on agenda items. It was at this point that Chris Young, who once ran for mayor of Providence, and was forced to leave a mayoral debate because he would not let go of a large statue of the Virgin Mary, decided to approach the podium. Note that he is told that he is only to speak on agenda items. But he is "crafty," and like Homer Simpson putting on his reading glasses to mount a legal defense, he dives in:

Virtually incomprehensible.

After another speaker actually spoke on agenda items, there was a short break before comments on non-agenda items began. I was prepared for a long night, but actually it went by pretty quickly. First up to defend the banner was Lisa French, who started shrill and then ended by screaming.

Not to get too political here, but is anyone surprised she supports Ron Paul?

Other speakers stood up to defend the banner, including former mayoral candidate Richard Tomlins, who at least had the decency to call out Lisa French on her shrill behavior. (I am not placing it here, but all the videos can be seen on YouTube, except for one of the pro-banner students who asked me to take his down, which I did because he is a minor. My channel is Atomicsteve.)

The next speaker of note for keeping the prayer up was Pastor Richard Lehe. Trying to strike a conciliatory tone, I feel he rambled a bit and his point was probably lost on both sides. One reason I mention him is because he was given extra time. Public comment was to be limited to three minutes. Lehe took just less than four minutes, even with his Steve Martin-ish turn at playing with the microphone.

Out of fairness I will include my statement here as well. I was very nervous, and mostly wanted to thank the School Committee and the Cranston Police for promptly seeing to Jessica's safety in the wake of the threats made against her. Actually getting up and speaking in front of so hostile a crowd gives you a real appreciation for how brave Taylor and Jessica are. Speaking to large gatherings is difficult when people like you. It's almost impossible when they hate you.

Another banner supporter spoke, speaking of religion and the power of God in a very reasonable, if misguided way. What the people pushing for appeal seem to fail to realize is that the case was lost in large part because they insist not on the historical importance of the banner as an artifact or piece of art, but as a prayer to their Christian God. The fact that the prayer is a Christian Prayer is not in doubt. It is a fact, and prayer's, painted on the wall or recited in class are illegal.

The next speaker was certainly the most reasoned, but I'm biased because he's also a good friend. Daniel Ciora is a lawyer, and a good one. He makes his case here very wisely, and it would behoove the School Committee to consider his words.

Following that small oasis of reason, we entire the wide desert. First up is Kara Russo and then her longtime boyfriend Chris Young. Chris once proposed to Kara during his closing remarks at a Providence Mayoral debate where he didn't try to drag in his Virgin Mary statue. At this meeting they were both relatively restrained.

A voice of reason came shortly afterwords in the form of Kerry Kelaher. She argued that the School Committee should not be wasting money on defending the banner when it could be better spent doing things like educating the children. She argued that this should be looked at as a simple monetary issue. This point angered some in the crowd, as we shall soon see.

Next up came local amateur historian Ron LaRue. He is a man obsessed with a little known book called the New England Primer. I've covered LaRue's previous appearances on this issue here. (http://www.cautionchurchahead.com/2011/03/ron-larues-statement-on-prayer-banner.html) He was also at the state house before Christmas protesting the term "Holiday Tree." But in this appearance, he says something very revealing. He mentions being in contact with Christian minister David Barton, founder of the Christian group Wallbuilders, and a leading proponent of historical revisionism, pseudoscholarship and "outright falsehoods." As Wikipedia states, "His research has been described as flawed by many historians, who dismiss his work as that of "a biased amateur who cherry-picks quotes from history and the Bible." Ron LaRue seems very impressed with Barton, which is why his points seem so odd and convoluted.

With comments over, the audience is asked if anyone else would like to speak. With this invitation, and angered by the comments of previous speaker Kerry Kelaher, Lisa French stormed the stage, pulled money from her pocket, and threw it at the School Committee. I suppose if money is the issue, Lisa wants to solve it my donating a pocket full of ones. She was removed from the meeting by the police. The audience was told that everybody gets one chance to speak. Keep that in mind. One chance to speak.

A few more speakers got up to talk, all of them wanting to appeal the banner decision. Then Pastor Richard Lehe approached the podium, and asked to speak for a second time. Would he be told he could not speak, as Lisa French was? If he persisted, would he be escorted out by police? No. He's a Pastor. A "man of the cloth." Out of deference to his religious stature, the only man allowed to speak twice is Pastor Richard Lehe.

Do we need any more proof that religion is favored over non-religion in Cranston, even at public meetings dealing exactly this issue? I do not believe for one moment that the School Committee was even aware of their favoritism, so natural and ingrained is this idea in their culture and their minds. As if to prove my point, when Oscar Tassoni rises to take his second turn at the podium, he is rebuffed.

There is irony here that both Oscar Tassoni and Lisa French were victims of religiously based discrimination. They are both defending their view of Christian exceptionalism, and are both treated as second class citizens as a direct result of this. Beyond the deference of the School Committee, there is also Lehe's assumption of privilege. He walks up to the podium expecting to be heard. This comes from a lifetime of ministerial experience: He speaks for God, get out of the way, rules be damned.

After the public comments were over the School Committee moved on to other business, continuing their review of the budget. Jessica, Dan, Taylor and a few others were escorted out to our cars by the police. I've never in my life felt the need for a police escort before, and I really appreciated the one I got.

Cranston florists refuse to deliver roses to Jessica Ahlquist | Breaking News | providencejournal.com | The Providence Journal

2012-01-19T00:57:00.000-05:00

Cranston florists refuse to deliver roses to Jessica Ahlquist

Going on The John DePetro Show

2012-01-18T08:29:00.001-05:00

Steve Ahlquist on the John DePetro Show

A very fair recap of my appearance. Unfortunately I dressed for the radio, rushing out to make the show on time, so the picture could be better.

Rally at billboard supports Cranston teen, politics free from religion - Warwick Beacon

2012-01-17T22:16:00.000-05:00

Rally at billboard supports Cranston teen, politics free from religion - Warwick Beacon

Jessica Ahlquist's Uncle says there is NO GOD on the John DePetro Show

2012-01-17T15:10:00.000-05:00

John DePetro Show | Cranston Student's Uncle says there is NO GOD

Today I was on the John DePetro Show.

Surreal.

I Stand with Jessica Ahlquist, obviously

2012-01-16T13:57:00.000-05:00

Threats directed at teen

2012-01-14T16:37:00.001-05:00

Threats directed at teen

From today's Providence Journal. Jesica Ahlquist and the leaders of the community responds to the threats made against her.

Cranston officials investigating threats against student who filed prayer-banner suit | Breaking News | providencejournal.com | The Providence Journal

2012-01-13T14:25:00.000-05:00

Cranston officials investigating threats against student who filed prayer-banner suit | Breaking News | providencejournal.com | The Providence Journal

Cranston West student's uncle decries 'cyber bullying' in wake of prayer banner decision | Breaking News | providencejournal.com | The Providence Journal

2012-01-13T13:58:00.000-05:00

Cranston West student's uncle decries 'cyber bullying' in wake of prayer banner decision | Breaking News | providencejournal.com | The Providence Journal

Girl at the Center of the Cranston “Prayer Banner” Case targeted by Cyber-Bullies

2012-01-13T13:52:00.000-05:00

Girl at the Center of the Cranston “Prayer Banner” Case targeted by Cyber-Bullies

Jessica Ahlquist's RI ACLU Press Conference January 12, 2012

2012-01-12T23:44:00.001-05:00

On January 11, 2012, Senior U.S. District Court Judge Ronald R. Lagueux ruled that the "Prayer Banner" at Cranston West High School violated the establishment clause of the First Amendment and ordered it to be removed immediately.Jessica Ahlquist, a sixteen year old atheist, had won her case.

John M. Barry on Rhode Island Founder Roger Williams

2012-01-12T14:00:00.001-05:00

John M. Barry speaks at the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University on January 11, 2012 about his new book Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul: Church, State, and the Birth of Liberty. Using Roger Williams as his focus, Barry speaks about the intellectual forces that drove Williams to found Rhode Island as the first government on Earth that guaranteed freedom of conscience for people of all religion and people of no religion.

This is especially important given the present battles in Rhode Island and the United States over the separation of church and state.

Valerie Huber and the National Education Abstinence Association's Lies

2012-01-11T12:00:00.000-05:00

Watch out for Valerie Huber

The Associated press ran an article two days ago by Kimberly Hefling entitled "New sex education standards released" which provides an interesting example of everything that's wrong with political debate in this country. A bunch of groups got together and composed a new set of guidelines for sex education for classes from K-12 for US public schools. The groups include the American Association of Health Education, the American School Health Association, the National Education Association - Health Information Network, the Society of State Leaders of Health and Physical Education, Advocates for Youth and the Future of Sex Education Initiative.

These groups got together and came up with a bunch of good, smart, reasonable recommendations, some of which Hefling covers:

By the end of second grade, the guidelines say students should use the correct body part names for the male and female anatomy, and also understand that all living things reproduce and that all people have the right to not be touched if they don't want to be. They also say young elementary school kids should be able to identity different kinds of family structures and explain why bullying and teasing are wrong.

Beyond lessons about puberty by the end of fifth grade, the guidelines say students should be able to define sexual harassment and abuse.

When they leave middle school, they should be able to differentiate between gender identity, gender expression and sexual orientation, according to the guidelines. And the say they should be able to explain why a rape victim is not at fault, know about bullying and dating violence and describe the signs and impacts of sexually transmitted diseases.

It calls for those leaving eighth grade to also be able to evaluate the effectiveness of abstinence, condoms and other "safer sex methods" and know how emergency contraception works. Many of these issues the groups encouraged to be further addressed in high school as well.

The recommendations drew praise from other organizations, including members of the American Academy of Pediatrics. The entire report can be read here: Download in [PDF] format.

So that's a slam dunk, right? Those best trained and best qualified to render advice on what constitutes decent sex education for our children have given us an easy to follow instruction guide on what kids need to know and when. For the safety of these kids and the good of society, we should follow this advice, right?

Nope.

Because in our culture today, whenever someone who knows what they are talking about speaks, a reporter has to find some idiot with the exact opposite opinion, however uniformed or misinformed that person might be. The list of experts from reputable institutions that truly care about informing children openly and honestly and with the best information available are contested by religiously motivated zealot who can only blather on like a broken record.

Valerie Huber, executive director of the National Education Abstinence Association, said she does not agree with the topics and goals of the standards. Like the anti-smoking campaign of the last few decades that has had success, abstinence should be the focus of such programs, she said.

"This should be a program about health, rather than agendas that have nothing to do with optimal sexual health decision-making," Huber said. "Controversial topics are best reserved for conversations between parent and child, not in the classroom."

National Education Abstinence Association is a 501(c)4 organization, meaning that it can collect and distribute funds to advocate abstinence only sex education. According to its website the group is made up of leaders and groups that "represent a broad network of state abstinence coalitions, medical and youth development organizations, and diverse professionals," but of course no names are given. The Member Comments page is hilarious, because it's a list of compliments from anonymous "Abstinence Education Providers" identified only by the state they live in.

And who is Valerie Huber? Is she a doctor, or an expert in education? Does she have any actual expertise in anything?

Executive Director, Valerie Huber brings significant grass-roots and administrative experience to this position as former director of a community-based abstinence organization and former Title V Coordinator for the State of Ohio.

Nope. But she claims to be "an expert on the history of sex education as well as the public policy decision-making that has influenced how sex education is taught in communities across the nation." What else can we know about her? Scott Swenson of RH Reality Check wrote about her way back in 2007:

Abstinence-only programs she ran in Ohio contained "false or misleading information about abortion, contraceptives and sexually transmitted diseases" so stated a study done by Case Western Reserve University Department of Public Health. According to Hypothetically Speaking, a bio of Huber states: "[her] program is still in its infancy, giving Valerie the unique opportunity to develop and fine-tune it. Valerie is infusing her Christian beliefs into this program."

It's just that some people's beliefs, Christian and otherwise, start with truth telling and respect for freedom of religion; they believe that is what kids should be taught and how government should be run. Huber is not a public health expert, but an outraged mom who started a program after her son's health teacher advised kids to use condoms if they were having sex. She parlayed her outrage into an abstinence-only program and was then appointed to a state job in the Ohio Department of Health by former Gov. Bob Taft (R-OH).

As the supervisor of the Ohio Department of Health's abstinence-only program, Huber attempted to secure a state contract for a company she was involved in. She was suspended by the department in 2006 when she was found guilty of ethics violations. Huber was represented by an attorney with ties to the Ohio Republican Party and the heir to the corrupt Taft regime, failed gubernatorial candidate Ken Blackwell, as reported in the Ohio newspaper, the Gay People's Chronicle.

So that's what's wrong with the country. On one side, we have experts who care, and want to make the world a better place. On the other side, we have liars and criminals who pretend expertise and purposely mislead people because of their religious beliefs and because running a 501(c)4 is better than working for a living.

And of course we have reporters like Kimberly Hefling willing to pretend that these two sides are somehow equally deserving of attention. The Valerie Hubers of the world only have the power we give them. If we continue to give credence to her kind of self-serving nonsense then our children will continue to suffer the consequences.

Elaine Pagels on the "New Atheism"

2012-01-10T19:49:00.004-05:00

On January 6th at six o'clock I was at the Central Congregational Church on Angell St in Providence, Rhode Island to hear Elaine Pagels talk about the most controversial book of the New Testament, The Book of Revelations. It was a free lecture, and interesting. She set about answering several questions, including: Who wrote the book? Why was it written? and How is the book interpreted today?

For the most part I found her explanations quite helpful in understanding the book. I really liked the way she broke down the timeline of events in Jerusalem, giving the book a historical perspective. Things became woo-y during the Q & A though, as Pagels attempted to explain how Jesus might have actually made an accurate prophecy about the destruction of the Jewish Temple, even though many now consider the prophecy to have been inserted after the fact, as in many years after the death of Jesus. She was quick to point out that it did not matter to her thesis whether or not Jesus actually made the prediction, but she was willing to entertain the idea that perhaps he did, which would have been miraculous, or at least incredibly prescient.

More bothersome to me was Pagels' cheap attack on the so-called new atheists that came right at the end of her lecture, in answer to a question from the audience. She made the completely untrue claim that Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens do not (or did not) understand the importance of emotion in religious belief. This is of course completely wrong. Of course they understand the importance of emotion in such beliefs, it is central to their very criticism. Here's Hitchens on the subject:

Does this mean that the inexplicable or superstitious has become “obsolete”? I myself would wish to say no, if only because I believe that the human capacity for wonder neither will nor should be destroyed or superseded. But the original problem with religion is that it is our first, and our worst, attempt at explanation. It is how we came up with answers before we had any evidence. It belongs to the terrified childhood of our species, before we knew about germs or could account for earthquakes. It belongs to our childhood, too, in the less charming sense of demanding a tyrannical authority: a protective parent who demands compulsory love even as he exacts a tithe of fear. This unalterable and eternal despot is the origin of totalitarianism, and represents the first cringing human attempt to refer all difficult questions to the smoking and forbidding altar of a Big Brother. This of course is why one desires that science and humanism would make faith obsolete, even as one sadly realizes that as long as we remain insecure primates we shall remain very fearful of breaking the chain.

In the God Delusion, Dawkins points out:

It is amazing how many people seemingly cannot tell the difference between 'X is true' and 'It is desirable that people should believe that X is true'. Or maybe they don't really fall for this logical error, but simply rate truth as unimportant compared with human feelings. I don't want to decry human feelings. But let's be clear, in any particular conversation, what we are talking about: feelings, or truth. Both may be important, but they are not the same thing.

I don't think that Pagels was being dishonest when she misrepresented the views of these two men. I think she mistakes their stridency for intolerance, and spoke out of ignorance. She created a straw man atheist and decried its views, but really, when one can allow themselves to be seduced by the possibility of Biblical miracles, one has already abandoned logic.

Providence Journal misses the point on Roger Williams

2012-01-08T13:47:00.000-05:00

Providence Journal staff writer John Hill reviewed John M. Barry's Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul in a piece entitled "Roger Williams with us yet". Hill's point is interesting, as he compares the controversies of Williams' day with those afflicting our state now:

If Roger Williams were somehow able to return to the city he founded 375 years ago, he would be astounded by Providence Place Mall and confounded by smart phones. But if he took 10 minutes to read the papers, he’d think, “Man, it’s like I never left.”

Just this past month, talk radio was abuzz over whether the Blue Spruce in the Capitol was a “Holiday Tree.” In the fall, the Cranston School Committee refused to take down the Cranston West school prayer. They were the same kind of debates Williams provoked, questioning how much God should be in mankind’s government, and how much earthly government should be in God.

We can't in fact ask what Williams would think of the current controversies, but I'm pretty sure he would, in his wise, intelligent way, quickly perceive that the two examples Hill gives, the "Holiday Tree" controversy and the prayer on the wall at Cranston West High School, were already decided three and a half centuries earlier.

Williams would say both examples clearly violated his vision of the separation of church and state. Far from seeing this as a vigorous and ongoing debate, Williams might be disheartened to see the same tired arguments being put forth to bolster religion's influence on the secular world through the exercise of political power.

Hill, in his review, understands this:

He was one of the first in America to argue that each individual had the freedom to choose how he wanted to worship God, not the government, and everyone had to tolerate those who disagreed. That right to choose extended to the secular, political world as well, where he said it was the people who had the right to decide for themselves the type of government they wished; authority flowed from the people up to their leaders, not the other way around.

He came up with the idea of the wall between church and state, but his wall was meant to protect Eden, the church, from what he called the wilderness, the world of man, on the other side. Breach the wall, he warned, and the wilderness would spoil the garden. In other words, when you mixed politics and religion, you don’t get loftier politics, you get polluted religion.

The prayer on the wall of Cranston West High School is a breach of this ideal. The insistence of Christians to use the term "Christmas Tree" for a secular tree lighting ceremony is an attempt to forfeit Williams' lofty idea. The fact that we have not yet legalized LGBT marriage in this state, is an encroachment on our liberties.

We shouldn't have to argue this issue any more. The First Amendment enshrined the ideals of Roger Williams into law, and they have become part of the very DNA of our country. Everything great about our country flows from this, and forgetting that, or letting others push their ideas about the supernatural into our politics, robs us of our future.

Was Thomas Nast really a Bigot?

2012-01-06T14:53:00.001-05:00

It takes one to know one, I guess. Bill Donohue of the Catholic League, a man who Don Quixote-like defends the Catholic Church against charges of bigotry against homosexuals, has decided to take on 19th century cartoonist Thomas Nast because of cartoons that Donohue considers bigoted against Catholics. Donohue is incensed that The New Jersey Hall of Fame plans to add Nast to its list of luminaries that includes Albert Einstein and Shaq. As Donohue puts it in his trademarked blowhard style:

Catholics will be outraged to learn that of the 50 nominees for the class of 2012, Thomas Nast made the cut. Nast is not only the most bigoted cartoonist in American history, the 19th-century artist consistently inflamed hatred against the Irish and Catholics alike.

Was Nast anti-Catholic? Yes. From Wikipedia:

Nast, a German Protestant, considered the Roman Catholic Church a threat to American values, and often portrayed the Irish Catholics and Catholic Church leaders in hostile terms. In 1871, one of his works, titled "The American River Ganges,"[seen at the heading of this post] portrayed Catholic bishops as crocodiles waiting to attack American school children; they wanted to have Catholic schools for Catholic children. Nast expressed his feelings about ethnic Irish in his depictions of the Irish as violent drunks.

But was nast a bigot? Compare the Wikipedia article continues:

In general, his political cartoons supported American Indians and Chinese Americans. He advocated abolition of slavery, opposed segregation, and deplored the violence of the Ku Klux Klan. One of his more famous cartoons, entitled "Worse than Slavery", showed a despondent black family holding their dead child as a schoolhouse is destroyed by arson, as two members of the Ku Klux Klan and White League, paramilitary insurgent groups in the Reconstruction-era South, shake hands in their mutually destructive work against black Americans.

Worse than Slavery

Is this the work of "the most bigoted cartoonist in American history" or simply the work of a person who distrusted the theocratic leanings of the Catholic Church?

Morton Keller writes, in The World of Thomas Nast:

It may be asked why Nast’s sympathy for blacks, Indians, and Chinese did not extend to the Irish and Catholicism. Mid-nineteenth century liberals—and Nast certainly was one of them—regarded the Catholic church as the fount of anti-modernism and fanaticism. (See fig. 16.) This attitude was reinforced by the commitment of many Irish-Americans to the Democratic party, hostility to abolition, and Negrophobia. The intertwining of his hostility to the Church, the Irish, and the Tweed Ring suggest that for him this was another chapter in the ongoing struggle to preserve the American Union, and Lincoln’s new birth of freedom, from its enemies. In this sense the Confederates, the anti-Reconstruction, pro-Johnson Democrats, and the Tweed Ring and the Catholic church were parts of a collective whole. It stirred in Nast the peak of his distinctive mix of artistic inventiveness and political passion.

It has been wisely said that only a fool would tolerate intolerance. Nast recognized in the Catholic Church a dangerous conservatism and theocratic bent that might undermine American values, values so recently threatened by the American Civil War.

Here in Rhode Island, the most Catholic state in America, we can see this allegiance to unAmerican values, as the Providence Diocese, under Bishop Tobin maintains a lobbyist at the State House to argue for Catholic concerns, such as limits on procreative rights and a ban on GBLT equality. In Pawtucket, private Catholic schools were, until recently, given first dibs on publicly maintained recreational fields. Public schools were forced to make due with inferior fields or even do without. (A verdict on that case is still pending in Federal Court.) A Catholic Priest, Father Roman R. Manchester, has provided the blessings at Tea Party events at the state capitol, before breaking into a stirring speech about how there is no such thing as separation of church and state, and how the First Amendment was invented to protect the church from the state, not the other way around.

On a national level Rick Santorum, a very right wing Catholic, has become a darling of Evangelicals because of his anti-homosexual and anti-procreative rights stance. He goes so far as to want states to be able to outlaw birth control. The Catholic Church's rightward swing has only intensified since Vatican II, and the easy alliance they've made in America with Evangelicals is frightening to those of us concerned about Enlightenment values.

What's most disturbing about Nast's image of crocodile-like bishops emerging from the water to devour children is how strangely prescient it is of the recently revealed pedophilia scandal that is plaguing the Catholic Church worldwide. It would not take much to reinterpret that cartoon in light of the events of the last decade. The Catholic Church has, routinely and with great deliberation set out to conceal the ongoing rape and torture of children.

It is not bigotry to point this out. It would be the height of moral turpitude not to.

Just say No to Jesus

2012-01-06T12:03:00.002-05:00

At the church that's showing the Left Behind movie to high school students.

Ghosts in Rhode Island

2012-01-05T14:30:00.000-05:00

Idiots

Rhode Island has a grand tradition of religious tolerance, and is the birth place of the concept of separation of church and state, thanks to founder and visionary Roger Williams. Despite such a proud heritage, there are two cases pending regarding church-state separation, one in Cranston concerning a school prayer painted on the wall, and one in Pawtucket where Catholic parochial schools are given first dibs on publicly maintained recreational fields. We also had a big hullabaloo about whether decorated evergreens on state property should rightly be call "Holiday Trees." We have a powerful Catholic Church and a strong Tea Party presence in the state, and our Democrats for the most part behave like Republicans elsewhere.

And to top it all off we're the home of The Atlantic Paranormal Society, the group made famous on the SyFy series Ghost Hunters.

It's embarrassing to live here sometimes.

Today's Providence Journal decided to give front page coverage to the ghost hunters, because Jason Hawes and Grant Wilson are coming to Providence (a twenty minute drive from their base in Warwick) to investigate possible ghosts at City Hall. Their suspects for ghosts include former mayor Thomas Doyle (d.1886) city sergeant Edward S Rhodes (d. 1903) and/or Geoffrey Secor (d. 1998). The attention of the ghost hunters was gotten when a city worker heard voices in the night:

“I was walking out of the fifth-floor restroom when I heard something that I thought was a ghost,” Elise Swearingen, a city employee, told The Journal on Wednesday. “It whispered to me, ‘Not today.’ I called the officers downstairs, and we checked and found no one. It literally sounded like it was right next to me.”

Swearingen said she went home that summer night in 2011 and emailed The Atlantic Paranormal Society (T.A.P.S.), the Warwick group that stars in “Ghost Hunters.” They didn’t call her back until three weeks ago.

This comes, of course, one day after my niece Jessica found out that 14 out of 20 kids in her debate class believed in ghosts, based on the weight of souls measured leaving the bodies after death. The fact that the "scientific" study that gave these results is totally bogus did not dissuade her fellow students from believing, just as the fact that the ghost hunters have never actually found anything like evidence for ghosts (and in fact have been accused of manufacturing the scant evidence they have obtained) keeps people from believing those idiots are doing anything but running around in the dark.

Argh.

FFRF Billboard goes up in Rhode Island!

2012-01-04T21:44:00.002-05:00

Your Personal Religious Views are not Relevant

2011-12-27T12:00:00.000-05:00

As Christmas Eve approached I read an op-ed in the Providence Journal by William Patenaude, a columnist for the Rhode Island Catholic. Patenaude uses the occasion of Christmas to defend his Church's stance against abortion and gay marriage. He puts forth a religious argument, which would be great, if Rhode Island were ruled by religion. Fortunately, we are a secular state with a Constitution that protects us from the worst excesses of religious intolerance.

Patenaude asks a series of questions he imagines those who are not Catholic might ask, and then gives us his answers:

Some wonder how Catholics can preach so much of love and equality when we resist modern realities like same-sex marriage and abortion, both of which are seen by many as human rights. Some ask how we can celebrate life while arguing against the healing potentials of embryonic stem-cell research. Others question if the Catholic expectation of chastity is no more than an attack on the freedom of our human nature.

These are not the questions that bother me. What bothers me is that Catholics are not content to simply live their lives in heterosexual relationships without the use of birth control or abortion, they also seek to tell mandate, through the law, how everyone else should live. I wonder how the Catholics would react if fundamentalist Amish insisted on taking away a Catholics right to electricity, or a Muslim who insisted on establishing Sharia law.

Patenaude wastes a lot of ink painstakingly laying out his understanding of theology, and wrapping it in a Christmas bow to boot, but he makes no argument whatsoever as to why the definition of marriage we accept in our culture must be his, meaning one man, one woman. He makes no argument as to why I can't have my own reasons for wearing a condom, or why a woman can't have autonomy over her own body when making a decision about terminating a pregnancy.

This oily appeal to our religious inclinations is a thin film that barely conceals Patenaude's fascism. We should all live the way he tells us, because his religion commands it. The Catholic Church Patenaude defends sinks money into lobbying the government against gay marriage, abortion and birth control. This is the same church that continues to cover up the rape and torture of children worldwide, contributes to the global AIDs crisis, and actively seeks to roll back the hard won rights of GBLT peoples worldwide.

You have a choice: You can live in a free country, believing as you wish, as long as everybody else has the right to believe as they wish, or you can live in a world where one group forces everyone to believe what it tells us to. Just remember that the group that controls the world may not be the one you're hoping for.

Voting is a Human Right, even in Rhode Island

2011-12-26T18:50:00.004-05:00

It's not exactly irony, but it is certainly disappointing that on the same day that eight different groups within the state of Rhode Island are pushing for some sort of clarification from the Board of Elections on the Voter ID law that takes effect this January 1st, the Justice Department decide to block South Carolina's version on the grounds that it makes it harder for minorities to cast ballots.

There is little difference between the law passed in South Carolina and the one passed in Rhode Island, in fact there is nearly no difference. So why did the Justice Department go after South Carolina, and leave our state unmolested? According to the New York Times:

Under the Voting Rights Act, an election rule or practice that disproportionately affects minority voters is illegal — even if there is no sign of discriminatory intent. South Carolina is one of several states that, because of a history of discriminatory practices, must prove that a measure would not disproportionately discourage minority voting.

So is the deciding factor in what state to go after comes down to who won the Civil War and who did better during the Civil Rights era? Maybe. But maybe another reason is that Rhode Island, to its embarrassment, is the only state with a Democrat controlled legislature to pass such a bill. From Governing.com:

Some political observers in the state have suggested that shifting demographics contributed to tensions between black and Hispanic legislators, possibly prodding some veteran lawmakers to use the new voter ID rules to strengthen their own electoral position.

The inside word on this is that a couple of black, Democrat legislators, fearing the turnover in their neighborhoods from black to Latino, helped the newly elected Tea Partiers to disenfranchise some voters by enacting this law. It is not hard to understand why former Republican, now Independent Governor Lincoln Chafee signed the thing, he used to be a Republican after all.

Participation in the Democratic process is a human right. Disenfranchising voters, racially, politically or even by accident, is a terrible thing. Rather than erecting barriers, we should be doing everything we can to get people to vote.

Catholic versus Public Schools in Pawtucket RI

2011-12-22T10:11:00.000-05:00

On October 14, 2009, the ACLU, on behalf of seven plaintiffs and their families, brought a lawsuit against the City of Pawtucket “charging that the Parks and Recreation Division has, for a number of years, given preferential treatment to parochial schools over public schools in granting permits for the use of city athletics fields.” The suit sought a court order declaring the preferential treatment towards religious schools and the lack of objective standards for granting permits for field use unconstitutional. Though the suit says “religious” it could just as easily read “Catholic,” as in Roman Catholic.

The Diocese of Providence claims to represent nearly 619,964 Catholics in Rhode Island. A 2009 survey by Gallup placed the percentage of Catholics in the state at 53%. (A recent survey by Trinity College places the number at 46%) The United States Census determined that Rhode Island has about 1,053,209 people in it, which works out to 558,201 self-identifying Catholics. The significant difference of over 61 thousand people should be noted.

Still despite these caveats, Rhode Island is the most Catholic of the United States, which has the effect of sometimes warping our politics and policies towards a kind of fundamentalist Catholic mindset. It may surprise the rest of the country that there is still an official “School Prayer” on the wall of Cranston West High School, or that a huge flap can be made about what to call a decorated evergreen on state property between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day, but if you live here and pay attention, you would understand this to just be the way things are. The RI Tea Party, such as it is, is made up of many Catholics. I watched the same Catholic priest give the opening prayer at two Tea Party rallies at our state house, and then follow with a speech about how the First Amendment guarantees freedom of religion, not freedom from religion. It was both sad and creepy.

So the latest suit to be brought by the ACLU can be seen as yet another attempt to stem the tide of this right wing Catholic trend. Public property is being used for private Catholic school’s sporting events and the private Catholic schools have long been given first dibs on using the property. The ACLU press release explains:

For example, O’Brien Field, a public field that was refurbished with tax money in 2001… has since been reserved exclusively for use by Saint Raphael Academy, “particularly on week-day afternoons in the fall season, despite repeated requests by various public school officials for use of [the field] for public school sponsored interscholastic sports.” The suit further alleges that public junior high school teams have been denied the use of at least two other fields, which have often been reserved for the use of St. Raphael and/or Bishop Keough Regional High School’s athletic teams, both of which are private sectarian schools.

At the time the suit was filed in 2009, Maggi Rogers, who once stood on the Parks and recreation board and is also the lead plaintiff, had this too say:

We are frustrated by six years of stonewalling by city officials, grateful for the assistance of the RI ACLU, and optimistic that the Constitution will prevail. It is discouraging to teach our public school students about the Bill of Rights in the classroom and then see them look out those same classroom windows to see it violated on a daily basis.

RI ACLU director Steve Brown added:

It is appalling that city officials have so cavalierly, and for so long, discriminated against their own public school students in order to benefit religious schools. We are hopeful that today’s lawsuit will bring an end to this disturbing practice.

Though Maggi Rogers mentions that she has been working for six years to remedy this situation, the preferential treatment for Catholic schools goes back much farther than 2003. Maybe even forty years farther back, as we will see shortly. Maggi Rogers adds, “The implied message is that the ruling class of Pawtucket takes care of St. Raphael Academy.” It should be noted that two of the other the plaintiffs in the suit were once members of the Pawtucket School Committee, so they have an insider’s knowledge of the way the city works. These are not trouble making atheists, they are concerned, involved citizens and parents.

Named in the suit is William Mulholland, Pawtucket Parks and Recreation superintendent. He made a habit of not speaking directly to the press, and of letting the City Solicitor, Margaret Lynch-Gadaleta, speak for him. The allegations in the lawsuit were, of course, denied. St Raphael’s Academy, named in the suit for receiving special favor, but not actually being sued, issued the following statement:

St. Raphael said that it does not believe it gets special treatment and that more than half the families of its student athletes live in the city and pay taxes.

Which in my mind amounts to “we don’t receive any special treatment but even if we did, half our kids are residents and therefore it’s kind of okay.” In fact, as the Boston.com article points out, St. Raphael’s Academy had obtained an exclusive permit to use the field, year in and year out, a field that is maintained by city workers and city funds. Maggi Rogers points out that:

public school students have sometimes been denied a field on which to practice or have been forced onto subpar playing facilities. She recalled a time when a public high school girls’ soccer team had to play on a field that she said was littered with glass and dog feces.

Private school kids get a well maintained field, paid for with city taxpayer dollars, while public school kids get broken glass and dog shit. Sounds about right.

Oddly, part of the City of Pawtucket’s defense is that there is a “long-standing lack of written policies [that] has enabled and continues to enable [Pawtucket] to provide preferential field allocation to religious schools.” A weird defense to be sure. Until recently the decision as to what schools get which fields rested entirely with the Pawtucket Parks and Recreation Superintendent.

Maggi Rogers had been trying to get the city to enact some sort of policy regarding the fields for at least six years, but the actual problem goes back much farther than that. Testifying at the trial, which began December 15, 2011, the now retired Mulholland testified:

that the assigning of fields and other facilities had been a “grandfathered” process going back before his time. When conflicts arose, he said, he sought guidance from the city public works director.

“I continued what my predecessors did,” Mulholland said, noting he had worked for three or four past parks and recreation superintendents. “I’d say 99 out of 100 times [the various fields and facilities for school teams] were grandfathered in.”

The use of this “grandfathering” procedure simply ensured that the preferential treatment the parochial schools were receiving would continue forever. There was no way any well meaning citizen’s group could have broken through this, no appeal to fairness or the Constitution that could sway policy. A lawsuit became the only recourse.

After months of discovery, during which time the City of Pawtucket slyly adopted a policy for assigning fields to schools, on February 3, 2011 the ACLU asked the court for a summary judgement. As the ACLU volunteer attorney Sandra Lanni points out:

until last year, the Office of Parks and Recreation had no written policies governing the issuance of permits for city owned athletic fields. Even the new policy, which the ACLU claims is still deficient, is ignored anyway, leaving parks Superintendent William Mulholland with total discretion in deciding what schools get to use the fields.

So an inadequate policy was adopted and never used, surely this was a ruse to trick the court into thinking that the City had changed its ways. The motion continued:

There is no dispute that City of Pawtucket has and continues to empower the Superintendent of Parks and Recreation to issue permits for the use of its fields and related facilities in his complete and absolute discretion, in violation of the First and Fourteenth Amendments of the United States Constitution. Further, the Superintendent has exercised his authority in such a way as to benefit private, sectarian schools operated by the Roman Catholic Diocese of Providence. By so doing, the City has failed to abide by the neutrality towards religion required by the Establishment Clause.

The City, of course, denied all wrongdoing:

Mayor Doyle and other city officials have maintained that the city's position regarding the use of playing fields had been one of trying to accommodate all of the city schools' athletic teams, both public and private. 

For some reason, the Roman Catholic Diocese of Providence felt compelled to issue a statement, though they are not actually named in the suit:

A spokesman for the Roman Catholic Diocese of Providence had also previously issued a statement saying that St. Raphael Academy did not believe that it received preferential treatment with regard to athletic fields in the City.

While the RI ACLU case was underway, a local Pawtucket attorney, Mark McBurney, considered a lawsuit that would seek to end the free use of public fields for private schools on the grounds of the First Amendment clause regarding church/state separation. McBurney tried to generate interest in the issue, but the mainstream media in Rhode Island did not want to give McBurney the time of day. Perhaps his action, launched at a time that the ACLU was suing the City of Pawtucket, confused the issue.

McBurney did get some press, though. A local progressive newsweekly, The Providence Phoenix, had this to say, courtesy of contributors Phillipe and Jorge’s “Cool, Cool World” on August 24, 2011:

A couple of weeks ago, I met with Pawtucket attorney Mark McBurney, a member of the storied Pawtucket clan. He is suing Pawtucket in Federal District Court for alleged First Amendment violations. He wanted me to take a look at the case and, perhaps, let readers of the "Cool, Cool World" know what it's all about.

Mark, in an unpublished op-ed he showed me, says that for "44 years and counting, Pawtucket City Hall has violated the 1st Amendment by subsidizing and giving preferential treatment to Catholic school athletics."

He says that the "grandfather clause" that claims an unwritten policy by which "Catholic schools in Pawtucket are allowed to use the City's best athletic fields, for eternity, and for free," flies in the face of the First Amendment. He notes, "Compare feces- and glass-strewn Abeka Field (which Tolman has been forced to use in recent years) with plush O'Brien Field (which City Hall reserves exclusively for St. Raphael's Academy) for tangible proof of Pawtucket's apartheid."

Yes, McBurney compares what Pawtucket is doing to conditions in the segregated South of yore. He says that such policies flourish in an atmosphere of secrecy and that the city of Pawtucket is blatantly following this course. "City Hall knows secrecy is the key to continue diverting City assets to Catholic voters. With four violations of the Access to Public Records Act, the only recorded failure of a RI city to comply with an Attorney General ruling on the Public Records Act, and a long-standing refusal to create a written policy governing field allocation, Pawtucket stands apart — and not in a good way."

The ball is now in Pawtucket Mayor Donald Grebien's court. Jorge has great admiration and respect for Mayor Grebien and no reason to believe that he is not a man of honor and integrity. Everything he has done since his election indicates that. I hope that he'll be able to see this current imbroglio for what it is. Attorney McBurney is right about this matter.

Despite the optimism about Mayor Grebien being a man of honor, in fact nothing was done by city officials to resolve the issue, just more stonewalling and business as usual. McBurney and his potential lawsuit were just ignored. He was interviewed on Freethought Rhode Island, a locally produced broadcast by the Rhode Island Atheists and invited to speak at their monthly meeting, but other than that, very little press.

To attract attention to his cause, McBurney decided to “crash” as the Pawtucket Valley Breeze put it, a City of Pawtucket photo contest. The Valley Breeze showed little in the way of Constitutional understanding or journalistic integrity when they described McBurney as

A disgruntled local attorney, an activist who has taken local officials to task on a number of fronts.

McBurney’s entries into the photo contest were Photoshopped editorials, with titles such as “Pawtucket Politicians Who'd Rather Raise Taxes Than Cut Subsidies to Catholic Schools” and “You Must Be Catholic to Enter Per Order of Mayor Grebien.” Calling the titles of the photos too long, Pat Zacks, the photo contest organizer shortened the titles on many of McBurney’s photos. The first mentioned above was shortened to merely “Pawtucket Politicians” and the second to “You Must be Catholic to Enter.” According to McBurney, the alterations “eviscerated artistic intent and rendered the photos meaningless.” The photos were also apparently placed close to the floor and in a hard to see place when displayed with other entries. Pat Zacks, the woman who censored McBurney’s titles, whether for length or content, is a supporter of Mayor Grebien.

A letter written by a Catholic priest, the Reverend Ronald E. Brassard of the Immaculate Conception Parish in Cranston RI and a graduate of St Raphael Academy went after McBurney and called his photos “classless” :

More disturbing than the discussion of the playing field is the article concerning the classless photographs of Mark McBurney. Obviously, angry with the church, Mr. McBurney is both callous and calumnious in his portrayal of the relationship between faith and government. The richness of the Blackstone Valley is how many different dimensions of faith exist side by side with government and politics. The petty photographs that Mr. McBurney submitted are shameful, not for their lack of good photographic skills, but for the baseness of their intent and the lack of respect contained therein.

What is so strange is Mr. McBurney, as well as many of those who have opposed the use of O'Brien Field by Saint Raphael Academy, were all educated at St. Raphael Academy.

Whenever a Catholic, or former Catholic criticizes the Church, some official will accuse them of simply being “angry with the church.” This is an attempt at infantilizing the person making the complaint. Brassard goes on to point out that McBurney is himself a graduate of St. Raphael’s Academy, basically accusing him of biting the hand that fed him. Nowhere does the Reverend actually make a case for or against the preferential treatment of parochial schools in field assignments.

Note how often the church gets involved. If there is no preferential treatment, why is the church so keen to issue statements in favor of the status quo? What are they fighting to hang onto if everything is so fair? It is perhaps unfair for this article to point out that Brassard is named on BishopAccountability.org in connection with an abuse case from the 1970’s. From the website:

Summary of Case: Plaintiff claims he was 13 and student at St. Henry's Seminary in Illinois in 1970s when abuse began. Said Brassard and several other priests abused him. Sued 1995. Diocese said that, due to inconsistencies, Brassard would remain active at Immaculate Conception Parish in Cranston pending further investigation. Still active pastor at same church per diocesan website accessed Feb. 4, 2010.

and:

Man in 1994 alleged a ring of priests at the Our Lady of the Snows sexually abused him in the early 1980s, and pressured him and other teenage boys into soliciting men as sexual partners for the priests (St. Louis Post-Dispatch February 7, 1994). Brassard named as one of the abusive priests (Providence Journal-Bulletin May 5, 1995)

No criminal charges seem to have been brought.

The same day the McBurney photo story made the paper there was an interesting development in the case, and city officials were quick to capitalize on it to claim their hands were unstained by charges of favoritism to Catholic schools. Apparently St. Raphael Academy filled out the application for field use after the June 15 deadline. Remember the new policy put in place by Mulholland, the one he was accused of ignoring at his leisure? Well Mulholland retired, and his replacement, John Blais, decided to enforce the policy, as inadequate as the ACLU maintained it was.

Staff at St. Raphael Academy never filled out a required application to use city fields this fall, and now Pawtucket officials have dropped the private Catholic school to the bottom of the list as they get ready to hand out fall permits for use of the best facilities.

[St Raphael Academy] was required to submit an application to use fields by June 15 of this year, according to a new written policy adopted last year, an action city officials realized only recently never happened.

"Permit applications received past deadlines will be filed on an as-available basis," states the policy. "Absolutely no action will be taken on incomplete applications."

Of course it wasn’t that simple. It was only the looming lawsuit that caused the City of Pawtucket to move Saint Raphael Academy to the bottom of the list for field picks.

City officials initially said last week that because the intent was there on the part of St. Ray's officials when they e-mailed their desired fields earlier this year, the private school would be counted just as much "in compliance" with the regulations as the public school officials who submitted their applications on time.

The new policy would only apply to the first half of the academic year, with new applications to be reviewed for the spring by the parks and recreation department. Said Blais, “No 'favoritism' is being shown to St. Ray's or anyone else.”

The aforementioned man of honor Mayor Grebian, after saying that “no favoritism is being played,” summed it up this way:

“I’ve received more calls on this in the past couple weeks because of how it was handled," said Grebien. No one brought up the issue in July and August because no one was in school and thinking much about fall sports, said the mayor, but the issue has exploded since it was revealed that no application was ever submitted by St. Ray's.

The frustration of public school athletic directors has always been that St. Ray's seems to get O'Brien and other fields by default every year, said Grebien, but that can no longer happen now that there are written policies in place.

"It's never been a First Amendment issue. It's been about a best practice issue."

Parents of St Raphael Academy students were at first less than understanding about the new policy:

Grebien spoke of "concerned" and "emotional" St. Ray's parents who approached city workers last week to express a lack of understanding on how the whole fields mix-up could have happened. "I think they understand now that it was a legitimate mistake," he said.

Under the new rules for assigning fields:

the past history an organization has developed with the Parks and Recreation Department, as well as the "length of time a particular organization has been at a site," are no longer the first determining factors in deciding who gets priority use of city fields. New written requirements lay out the following criteria for deciding who plays where in order of importance:

* Type of activity that is most conducive to a given field.

* Field proximity and access.

* The history of an organization's use of a field in general and the particular field at issue. This would include parking and discipline issues, and issues surrounding alcohol, fighting and cleanliness.

* And "miscellaneous criteria."

It’s the last two points that are most prone to abuse on the part of the city. Let’s face it, only half the kids who go to St Raphael Academy are from Pawtucket, the rest are bussed in from all over the state. A public high school, like Tolman, will be made up entirely of Pawtucket residents, and though many will legitimately choose to go there, others are too poor to afford to go anywhere else. It is way more likely that discipline, alcohol, fighting and cleanliness issues will come from the public school than from the private. Also, “miscellaneous criteria” can mean anything.

It may have been something like this that caused Maggi Rogers, who is suing the City over unfair field use assignments to say:

“I apologize for taking the wind out of your sails, but it's the legal process that works, not the application process,” she said. “In my opinion, the (application) rules are not well-written, and we (in the city) don't have enough fields. I'd encourage people to really look at that application process.”

Note that for many, many years, St Raphael Academy got everything they wanted, but the first year they did not, it became a major issue, with Parks Commission Chair Terry Mercer conducting “an emergency meeting Wednesday night to request further information as to the fall season permitting process for school athletic and recreational field usage.” The wealthy and powerful of Pawtucket are prominently represented among St Raphael alumni, and the parents that pay to send their kids to the school want plenty of bang for their buck. As Maggi Rogers pointed out, “the ruling class of Pawtucket takes care of St. Raphael Academy.”

Reverend Brassard’s letter did something for Mark McBurney that was accidentally very helpful. It gave McBurney a chance to respond in print, and he responded beautifully, and with a lawyer's flair:

I welcome Rev. Brassard to the debate over whether public or religious school students should have first choice of Pawtucket's athletic fields, and whether Pawtucket taxpayers should continue their 44-year subsidy of Catholic school use of those fields.

In entering this debate, he ventures further than St. Raphael Academy principal Donohue-Lynch (who ignored my 2/1/11 request for a meeting) and Bishop Thomas Tobin (who referred my 3/31/11 request to his lawyers).

Rev. Brassard appears new to the issue, and may not know the problem started when the Diocese sold [St Raphael Academy]'s athletic field in 1967, thereafter dumping its responsibility onto Pawtucket taxpayers.

Or that [St Raphael Academy] recently raised funds for and built itself a $7 million dollar indoor athletic facility ("the premier high school athletics facility in R.I. and Southeastern Massachusetts," according to [St Raphael Academy]'s website) while continuing to quietly take subsidies from Pawtucket's beleaguered taxpayers.

Or that Bishop Tobin and Principal Donohue-Lynch (and Mayor Grebien) thoroughly stonewalled my attempts at "reasonable discourse" before I reluctantly filed suit.

Pawtucket's athletic fields and taxpayer dollars are finite. Someone gets first choice and someone doesn't. Someone pays and someone doesn't.

The 1st Amendment, and common sense, requires that the entity that caused this problem rectify it; that if [St Raphael Academy] can spend $7 million to build "the premier high school athletics facility in R.I." then it certainly doesn't need taxpayer subsidies for outdoor athletic facilities; that a city $13 million in debt shouldn't be in the subsidy or religious-preference business; and that the days of Pawtucket's 8,600 public school children taking a back seat to [St Raphael Academy]'s 200 Pawtucket students are over.

God loves public school children, too.

Finally, Rev. Brassard raises the age-old boogeyman of finding "strange" that beneficiaries of Catholicism (here, a Catholic education) dare challenge their benefactors. It is a sentiment heard less and less this last decade, both here and abroad.

Still, I wouldn't trade my Catholic education at [St Raphael Academy] (or Catholic University or Providence College or Notre Dame Law School) for anything.

But that education didn't teach me to turn a blind eye to misconduct, no matter who or what the perpetrator (especially where the malefactors know better). Instead, it taught me that a high wall of separation between church and state is in everyone's best interest and that to sin by silence when one should protest makes cowards of men.

That’s right, this problem goes back to 1967, when Saint Raphael academy sold the field in question to the City of Pawtucket, basically getting the city to subsidize the private school by taking care of their field. Since that time the city has maintained the field, and always given St Raphael Academy first dibs on using it. Most of the time, St Raphael Academy had exclusive use of the field, which was cared for at taxpayer’s expense. Meanwhile, they built themselves a private indoor sports complex, a complex you can bet will never be shared with students from a public school. So great is St Raphael Academy’s hold over the public fields in the city that O’Brien Field, one of the contested locations, is named for a deceased coach from St Raphael Academy!

The ACLU lawsuit began December 15, 2011. In a legal memorandum RI ACLU volunteer attorney Sandra Lanni cited the following examples:

* O’Brien Field has, with exceptions for only two seasons, routinely been kept off limits to public school interscholastic sports programs in order to favor St Raphael Academy. Further, the field “is locked to the public for the entire year other than the months it has been permitted to the St Raphael Academy football team for practice. These actions of the City not only impact municipal taxpayers as a whole, they directly and specifically impact the programs available to public junior and senior high school students in Pawtucket.”

* A request by public school athletic directors for the use of the McKinnon/Alves soccer field permitted to St Raphael Academy was denied even when it resulted in the canceling of public school games and practices as a result of insufficient field space.

The ACLU’s memo concludes: “The manner in which the City of Pawtucket issues field permits benefits only one type of private entity – private schools operated by the Roman Catholic Diocese of Providence. The City’s actions are not neutral and therefore impermissibly advance religion in violation of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.”

On December 21, 2011, the final day of testimony in the ACLU case, it was revealed that O’Brien Field was being held for St Raphael Academy, even in the fall of 2011, as had been the practice for decades, until it was realized that the school had neglected to hand in an application. Despite all the talk from city officials, had anything actually changed? It seemed unlikely. As the Providence Journal reported:

John Scanlon, the Tolman High School athletics director who requests fields for Tolman and several junior high school teams, sought O’Brien Field for several years, but was regularly denied it as it went to St. Raphael’s. Scanlon said his schools have needed more field space and that scheduling problems arose, with some practices canceled.

It was only a mistake on the part of the Parks and Recreation department and the team manager at St. Raphael Academy that prevented the parochial school from once again getting favored status over public schoolchildren. US District Chief Judge Mary M Lisi expects final arguments from both sides by February 1st for written final arguments. We can only hope the judge will do what is right, and find for the plaintiffs.

Meanwhile Brian McBurney continues to fight his lonely quest to get private schools to pay the city adequately for the use of its fields. It is certainly time to stop subsidizing private schools when so many public institutions are suffering severe cuts.

The Catholic Diocese in Rhode Island Fudges the Numbers

2011-12-20T14:40:00.001-05:00

The Diocese of Providence claims to represent nearly 619,964 Catholics in Rhode Island. A 2009 survey by Gallup placed the percentage of Catholics in the state at 53%. The United States Census determined that Rhode Island has about 1,053,209 people in it, which works out to 558,201 self-identifying Catholics.

The significant difference of over 61 thousand people should be noted.

In short, the Catholic Diocese uses inflated numbers to justify and expand their ability to influence policy and politics in Rhode Island. Is there a way to address this wrong?

Maybe.

We need to encourage those who have left the Catholic Church behind to fight through the Church bureaucracy and have their names removed from the church rolls. I'm looking for people to begin this process, or if you have already done this, to send me your stories, and document your experiences.

Stories and ideas from everywhere are welcome, but I am especially interested in those dealing with the Diocese of Providence.

Rhode Island's Holiday Tree: A Look at a Manufactured Controversy

2011-12-07T20:24:00.001-05:00

On November 28, 2011 in Rhode Island, Governor Lincoln Chafee's office issued a routine and rather perfunctory press release entitled "Governor Chafee to Host State Holiday Tree Lighting." The press release read, in part:

Rhode Island Governor Lincoln Chafee and First Lady Stephanie Chafee will host the annual State House holiday tree lighting in the State House Rotunda on Tuesday, December 6, 2011 at 5:30 p.m. All Rhode Islanders are invited to attend and see the 17-foot Colorado Blue Spruce lit for the first time. The tree was donated by Big John Leyden's Tree Farm in West Greenwich.

Santa Claus and Mrs. Claus will be available for a visit with the children. Light refreshments will be offered, along with entertainment by the Rhode Island Children's Chorus and the Governor's Own 88th Army Band.

A display of international holiday trees will reveal how the season is celebrated in different ways across the globe. The exhibit of trees from around the world will be located on the second floor of the State House in the halls surrounding the Rotunda.

The potential First Amendment controversy surrounding the erection of a Christian symbol on state property had been avoided in Rhode Island for years through the simple expedient of declaring that the tree to be decorated and illuminated was a secular Holiday Tree, rather than a Christian Christmas Tree. This was an obvious attempt at getting around church-state separation issues, and by most accounts, it was a successful end run. There is a case to be made, however spurious some may feel it to be, that Christmas is essentially a secular holiday.

Of course, Jews, Muslims, atheists/Humanists, Pagans, Buddhists and Jehovah's Witnesses may not agree with this idea of a secular Christmas enjoyed by all, but the present climate in the United States and present balance of the Supreme Court make it seem unlikely that there will be any successful legal challenges to the erection of Holiday Trees in the very near future.

A lighted, non-religious Holiday Tree lighting ceremony has been and will be the annual tradition at the Rhode Island State House for some time to come. In a very real sense, the Christian majority have gotten what they wanted: a symbol of their religion and their holiday prominently displayed in Rhode Island State House, and not just one tree, but "a display of international holiday trees" as well. For the time being, many of Rhode Island's Christian citizens are winning.

But this ongoing victory was not enough for right wing talk radio news jock John DePetro. The day after Governor Chafee's press release DePetro, in conversation with his guest, State Representative Joseph Trillo, invited a line of attack on the Governor based on a resolution passed at the Rhode Island State House of Representatives back in January, 2011 that mandated the use of the term Christmas Tree by all state employees.

It seems that way back in January, Trillo was a co-sponsor, along with freshman legislator and Tea Party darling Doreen Costa, of a House Resolution “Respecting Christmas Trees.” The resolution read, “RESOLVED, That it is the policy of the state that state officials and departments refer to the tree customarily erected or displayed in celebration of the period from Thanksgiving of each year to January of the following year as a "Christmas tree" and not as a "holiday tree" or other non-traditional terms."

Of course, such resolutions do not have the force of law, which is fortunate, because this particular resolution would be in direct violation of the First Amendment if that were the case. As First Amendment scholar David L. Hudson Jr. pointed out, “The First Amendment allows people to believe as they wish. It also says the government cannot compel us to speak or compel us to believe anything. State employees should be able to call a tree in their workplace a ‘Christmas tree,’ a ‘holiday tree,’ or just ‘a tree.’”

In some ways the unconstitutionality of the resolution is the least of its problems. According to the Providence Journal, the resolution “was approved by the House within moments of introduction, without any of the lawmakers getting copies of the measure on which they were being asked to vote.” Is it traditional to blindly pass resolutions without reading them? To make matters worse, buyer’s remorse set in immediately, with Gordon Fox’s chief legal council John Flynn pointing out that the resolution was “not properly before the body,” and therefore, presumably, in dispute. It is worrisome to those of us who care about democracy that the State House can pass resolutions without actually going through the trouble of reading them.

But let's get back to John DePetro's radio show and his guest Joseph Trillo, who helped sponsor the Christmas tree resolution. Trillo acknowledges that Governor Chafee had no legal obligation to follow the resolution's directive, but added, "I would hope that he would heed to the fact that it was the request of the General Assembly... in most cases people do. So I'm offended to have him call it a Holiday Tree."

Trillo added, "If you don't feel that there should be a Christmas Tree at the State House then eliminate the Christmas Tree, but don't call it something else." This seems an odd position for Trillo, who portrays himself as very pro-Christmas tree, to take. He seems to want there to either be a Christian Christmas Tree erected in the State House, a clear violation of the First Amendment, or nothing. Of course, Trillo is not the Governor of Rhode Island, so it is not his call to make. He is putting Chafee, who Trillo sees as a political enemy, on the spot, forcing the Governor to either eliminate the tree altogether, alienating Christian and Catholic conservatives or violate the First Amendment, one of the core principles upon which Rhode Island and the United States is based on.

Either way, Chafee loses.

John DePetro is a Rhode Island right wing talk radio host. His ratings depend on his ability to rile the conservative Christian base. A strong supporter of the Tea Party, DePetro seldom depends on nuanced or reason arguments when he speaks. His appeals are always emotive in nature, depending heavily on patriotism, religion and nostalgia. A local version of Rush Limbaugh, DePetro lacks the charisma and talent to go national, but that won't stop him from trying. He is savvy enough to know that "War on Christmas" stories can rally the base, so he ups the ante in his conversation with Trillo, claiming that "...for the past eight years, Governor Carcieri and Mrs. Carcieri would host the lighting of the State House Christmas Tree." This was a lie.

In fact, as Ted Nesi of WPRI.com showed, Governor Carcieris 2009 invitation referred to the tree to be decorated and lit as a Holiday Tree. The next day, on November 30th, Politifact, armed with this info, confronted DePetro:

When we contacted DePetro Tuesday evening, he said he did a Google search and found that in 2010 it was referred to as a Christmas tree. "I just went on last year," he said. "I think I said the eight years, but I didn't have that as a fact."

Politifact rated DePetro's comment as "False" on their Truth-o-Meter, and of course, DePetro backed down and apologized, right? Wrong. Before this debacle would be over, DePetro would double down on the lie on national television.

The same day Politifact revealed Depetro's lie, the radio jock was interviewing Timothy Reilly, Chancellor of the Roman Catholic Providence Diocese. Reilly said, ""It's one of those things, the old phrase 'what's in a word?' Well, for Christians it's pretty much everything. That word Christmas is one of the most sacred and precious words in our vocabulary of faith." Reilly added, "The [Governor's] decision was probably meant to inspire a unity but as we are seeing in these days this has just the opposite effect."

But where is this sense of division coming from? Governor Chafee was simply doing the same thing his predecessor Governor Carcieri did. In essence, he made no "decision" but simply followed established precedent. Carcieri, though, was politically far to the right of Chafee, and Carcieri was a Catholic. Chafee is a moderate Episcopalian, who supports gay marriage and a woman's right to choose, so the Catholic Church sees him as a political enemy. The Catholic Church could have supported Chafee in this, as they supported Carcieri. The reason for their change in policy was political.

The Reverend Don Anderson, "Executive Minister Rhode Island State Council of Churches told WPRO News, 'the tree has been called a variety of things over the year[s], it is in the statehouse which is a nonsectarian environment. Rhode Island has historically been the place where everyone is welcome, we’re the lively experience that said ever back in Roger Williams day, no matter what your faith tradition, you all come.'"

Chafee defended himself in a similar fashion, pointing out that Rhode Island's founder, Roger Williams, worked to secure a Royal Charter from the King of England that would guarantee religious freedom, the first time such a concept was enshrined in law. This idea lead to the First Amendment, and to the principle of the separation of church and state so important to the Founding fathers of the United States.

The Catholic Church in Rhode Island thrived because of our fidelity to the principle of religious toleration and freedom, so it is especially galling to hear Bishop Thomas Tobin's statement:

Governor Chafee’s decision to avoid the word Christmas at the State House ceremony is most disheartening and divisive. It is sad that such a secular spirit has swept over our state. The Governor’s decision ignores long held American traditions and is an affront to the faith of many citizens. For the sake of peace and harmony in our state at this special time of the year, I respectfully encourage the Governor to reconsider his decision to use the word Christmas in the state observance.

As we have seen, it was not Chafee who sought to politicize this non-event. It was DePetro, pursuing a right wing agenda, ratings and his own self-aggrandizement, and the Catholic Church under Bishop Tobin, who hope to weaken the Governor because of their disapproval of his position on issues that have nothing to do with Christmas. There is no reason, other than politics, that Bishop Tobin could not have agreed with Reverend Don Anderson, and supported the First amendment.

But there was still one more person who sought to make a career move out of this issue. Doreen Costa, the primary architect of of the bill Representative Trillo supported way back in January, the one that tried to force the State Government to call all decorated evergreens on State property "Christmas Trees."

Trillo may be a local political hack, but Tea Party success story Doreen Costa is a true believer. Costa, who identifies strongly as a Catholic, introduced the Christmas Tree resolution, in her own words, “on a whim,” but was “excited” when it passed. This after she had run on the promise that all resolutions and bills placed before the General assembly must be analyzed to be sure that they pass Constitutional muster before being considered, and that all bills placed before the body be done so in such a way as to ensure the legislators time to read them. Hypocritically, her very first action as a Representative was to force through a resolution that broke both these promises, "on a whim."

So on November 30th, while DePetro continued his assault on his radio show and Bishop Tobin issued his press release, Doreen Costa found her way to Fox News and the morning show Fox & Friends to be interviewed by Steve Doocy.

Right off Costa misrepresents the passage of the bill, stating only that the resolution passed unanimously on the house floor, with no talk about the problems with the resolution's passage or its questionable legality. Costa's account also directly contradicts the lie told earlier by DePetro. She explains that as a freshman legislator, Costa walked by the tree and learned that it was being referred to as a Holiday Tree. This is the tree put up by the previous Governor, Carcieri. If Chafee was changing the rules this year as DePetro claimed and Tobin implies, then how does that square with Costa's account?

After more conversation in which Costa got to extol her own virtues as a person who seemingly spends all her time doing volunteer work (when does she find time to legislate?) Steve Doocy puts the Governor's phone number up on a national network for loyal Fox viewers to use if they feel like complaining. The Governor would receive more than 3600 calls, all but 700 from out-of state. The story had gone national in a big way. Only 92 calls supported the governor's decision, which Christmas Tree supporters seemed to think was significant.

At the end of the interview with Doocy, Doreen Costa delivered her masterstroke, saying:

We will be holding a Christmas Tree lighting so if you want to go to a Holiday Tree lighting you can join the Governor, if you would like to come to a Christmas Tree lighting you can join myself...

Suddenly, there was going to be two competing tree lighting ceremonies at the State House. Costa had stolen the controversy out from under DePetro and Tobin. Not to be outdone, the next day the archdiocese of Providence announced their own Christmas Tree lighting ceremony, to compete with the Governor's, scheduled at the exact same time and date. The location would be only a short distance up the street from the State House.

Father James Ruggeri, Pastor of St. Patrick’s Parish, 244 Smith Street, today announced that the parish -in conjunction with the Roman Catholic Diocese of Providence- will host a Christmas Tree Lighting Ceremony and Prayer Service on Tuesday, December 6 at 5:30 p.m.

The event was scheduled to provide those Rhode Islanders who wish to maintain the celebration of Christmas rather than secularize the season with the ‘holiday’ label.

A choir will provide music then following a brief prayer service led by Bishop Thomas J. Tobin and Father Ruggeri, two children of the parish will light the Christmas tree.

Of course, as a protest, this Catholic tree lighting lacked teeth. Putting up a Christmas Tree on Church property is not only completely legal and expected, it's practically mandatory. What Tobin and the Church wanted to do was draw crowds away from the Governor's ceremony, in a perfectly acceptable example of separation of church and state. Beyond that, it's unclear what point they expected to make.

To continue the controversy, Fox & Friends' Steve Doocy the next day interviewed John Leydon of Big John Leyden's Tree Farm in West Greenwich, the guy who donated the Holiday Tree under the idea that he was donating a Christmas Tree. Doocy didn't ask the obvious question, "Why didn't Big John Leydon complain when Governor Carcieri called the donated tree a Holiday Tree?" and Leydon wasn't interested in doing anything other than advertising his tree farm to a potential Catholic/Christian/Tea Party audience. The amount of publicity his donation garnered for his business must have been staggering, and all he had to do was sell out the Governor he had donated his tree to, the Constitution of the United States, and any appearance of ethical values.

With the Bishop Tobin and Doreen Costa now both planning to hold separate tree lighting events to protest the Governor, poor John DePetro, the original architect of this mess, was left out in the cold with nothing to do but field angry calls from his listeners. Fortunately, DePetro works in radio, and pulling stunts is one thing radio personalities know how to do. DePetro got his turn on Fox & Friends where he announced his intention to use his radio audience to generate a "flash mob" at the Governor's tree lighting ceremony where they would all sing out "O' Tanenbaum" during the lighting in protest. This would be weird, because Tanenbaum does not actually translate to "Christmas Tree" and in fact when the time came to sing, it was Christmas Tree, not tanenbaum that was heard. (Note that Gretchen Carlson claims that Fox News has been following the story for weeks, when it has actually been mere days.)

DePetro guesses that close to a thousand people will show up for his flash mob, and says that he already has four hundred solidly committed. He says that the time and place of the flash mob must be kept a secret, but that they will be at the State House at 5:30 on Tuesday night for the lighting. This obvious contradiction doesn't even seem to slow him down. Then again, he is a liar. He claims the issue isn't religious, even as he claims that Chafee is trying to lock up the atheist vote with his actions. DePetro can never be bothered to string together anything amounting to a coherent argument.

When asked directly about whether Governor Carcieri called the illuminated evergreens under his tenure Christmas Trees, DePetro repeats the lie Politifact caught him in, saying that it was called a Christmas Tree in previous lighting ceremonies. John DePetro lied with a smile on his face to a national audience. The governor's number was repeated for angry viewers to respond to.

My own involvement in this debacle was fairly early. A blog post I wrote about Doreen Costa and Bishop Tobin's involvement in this made up controversy was in December 3rd's Providence Journal. Doreen Costa's non-answer to my op-ed appeared on the 5th, and was disappointing, because it essentially said nothing. I felt as if I had worked hard on my piece, and done the research, only to have Costa appeal to the nostalgia of Christmas and an odd appeal to fidelity to language.

So now the stage was set. The annual tree lighting ceremony, overseen by the governor, was going to have to compete with two rival lighting ceremonies, one up the street at St. Patrick's and the other inside the State House, just up the hall. Meanwhile, a right wing talk radio host was preparing a flash mob calculated to do nothing more than to embarrass the governor. What could possibly go wrong?

The night of the Holiday Tree lighting ceremony I arrived early and waited on the steps to meet friends. I watched as 88th Army Band unloaded equipment from their truck and hauled it through the doors. I watched as white shirted children from the Rhode Island Children's Chorus arrived with their families to sing at the Governor's event. I also noticed the so-called "flash mob" surreptitiously handing out photocopied fliers with the words to "O' Christmas Tree" on them. Plenty of people showed up carrying large signs declaring the Holiday Tree to be a Christmas Tree. And a man who identified himself as transgendered Santa Clause was running around in his boxers, in support of the Christmas Tree. His messaging was more confused than DePetro's.

The crowd in the State House, which the Providence Journal placed at about two hundred, consisted of three groups. People who had come to the tree lighting to see their kids perform in the choir, or to see the 88th Army Band, people who had come out to support John DePetro's flash mob and/or Doreen Costa's alternate tree lighting, and those there to support the governor's decision to keep this celebration secular. Six members of the Humanists of Rhode Island, a group I co-founded, were in attendance. I spotted some ACLU members, there to support the Governor, in the crowd. We were clearly in the minority, however.

Inside was chaos, with news reporters everywhere. All the local TV stations were represented, and all the local press. Before the night was over I had done interviews for WBZ in Boston, Channels 12 and 64 in Providence, another station I didn't catch, and the Providence Journal. I was handing out fliers outlining my secular position on the issue, along with the rest of our group. I was also handing copies of my Op-Ed from the Journal. My friend Paul Auger attempted to give one to Doreen Costa herself, but she turned him down with false good humor.

One man went out of his way to return my Op-ed to me crumpled into a ball. I kept that one.

The Children's Choir was singing their heart's out. Some of the songs they sang used the word Christmas. They also sang other seasonal songs. It was while they were singing "Holly Jolly Christmas" that the Governor flicked the switch, illuminating the Holiday Tree, and then removed himself from the crowd. Instantly the John DePetro "flash mob" of about fifty to seventy-five people began yelling the song "O' Christmas Tree" at the top of their lungs.

I was watching and listening from the third floor. Even as the mob burst into song, many of them realized how bad it looked to be suddenly drowning out a Children's Chorus. They were hopelessly trying to silence there fellow mob members even as others, caught off guard by the sudden singing, began to join in. The Children's Chorus, to their credit, didn't miss a beat. Though you could see the confusion on their faces when the crowd started singing, they troopered through.

Those in the crowd who had come to watch their kids sing were appalled. One little girl, who had come to watch her older sister sing and was visibly annoyed by the actions of DePetro's flash mob, was told by a protester that old people can do what they want. I read a comment on one sight that attempted to blame to crowd's rudeness on Chafee, because he flipped the switch and walked away, leaving the protesters no choice but to scream incoherent Christmas Carols at a bunch of hard working, innocent kids. If the Governor had stayed stuck around, the crowd would have targeted him, not the kids. But with no one to strike out at, the Children's Chorus was left to suffer the brunt of the attack.

Parents said the group of 80 singers was interrupted by protesters. "They were in the middle of 'Holly Jolly Christmas' and all these adults started to sing and they drowned the children out," said mom Denise Davis, "They were singing 'Oh Christmas Tree' and one of the things that was so upsetting is it was so planned."

Ten year old Olivia Yonkmae was on the risers singing at the time. "It just felt like they were trying to disrupt us and doing what they weren't supposed to do, even though we asked them not to," she said, "It was just chaos."

The fifth grader was supposed to meet Governor Lincoln Chafee and get a photo, but that didn't happen because the governor left the event right after the tree was lit, and some parents said that's because of all the protesters.

"It was a huge distraction," said dad Todd Yonkmae, "I mean, the folks with the signs and they're really kind of detracting from what the children were trying to do."

Of course John DePetro, a liar, claims that what people heard and saw, and what the news captured so clearly in their televised reports, did not happen:

[DePetro] said [the flash mob] started caroling after the kids finished a song.

Costa's lighting ceremony occurred after the Governor's, with many members of the flash mob moving into the hallway outside her office for the lighting. It was singularly unimpressive, and I would like to think that many present felt embarrassed at their rude behavior, because the crowd was much less boisterous. Costa said "This is what Christmas is about. We have a Christmas Tree, we're going to sing Christmas Carols..." Of course, that was exactly what was happening at the governor's tree lighting. Costa's distinction is meaningless, and her protest nonsensical.

Meanwhile, up the street at Bishop Tobin's Christmas Tree lighting ceremony, which was held outdoors, it rained. The Bishop, unaware that the word Christmas had not been eliminated from the Holiday Tree lighting ceremony (the Children's Chorus was singing "Holly Jolly Christmas," after all) said:

We're very disappointed that Governor decided to eliminate the word Christmas from his celebration, obviously there's a reason we do it in December.

and

Our debate about the Christmas Tree is not a trivial thing even though some have suggested that it is.

There's no question that Bishop Tobin could have used his position to build unity rather than to sow dissent. Had the Bishop simply attended the event his very presence would have given the Holiday Tree lighting the imprimatur of Christmas. In seeking to be divisive, the Bishop unintentionally reinforced the best kind of divisiveness, that of dividing church and state. In that sense the Bishop is right when he says this is no trivial issue. It is a fundamental precept upon which our Constitution is based.

Of course, I'm radically reinterpreting Bishop Tobin's message here, his intention is to attack the governor, and weaken the wall of separation.

It is plain to see that the only people attacking and ruining Christmas in Rhode Island this year are DePetro, Costa and Tobin, even as they pretend to be defending it.

Rhode Island's Holiday Tree Controversy

2011-11-30T10:10:00.001-05:00


Tree

Governor Chafee has wisely chosen to refer to the trees being lit at the State House on Tuesday, December 6th as “Holiday Trees” rather than “Christmas Trees” referring to Rhode Island’s proud tradition of freedom of and freedom from religion. Of course, critics took issue with the Governor's word choice.

Poor Doreen Costa. Her very first priority, upon being elected to the State House of Representatives as a Tea Party candidate was to push through a House Resolution “Respecting Christmas Trees.” The resolution read, “RESOLVED, That it is the policy of the state that state officials and departments refer to the tree customarily erected or displayed in celebration of the period from Thanksgiving of each year to January of the following year as a "Christmas tree" and not as a "holiday tree" or other non-traditional terms.”

Of course, such resolutions do not have the force of law, which is fortunate, because this particular resolution would be in direct violation of the First Amendment if that were the case. As First Amendment scholar David L. Hudson Jr. Pointed out, “The First Amendment allows people to believe as they wish. It also says the government cannot compel us to speak or compel us to believe anything. State employees should be able to call a tree in their workplace a ‘Christmas tree,’ a ‘holiday tree,’ or just ‘a tree.’”

Costa’s poor understanding of simple Constitutional issues notwithstanding, more troublesome is that the resolution passed at all. According to the Providence Journal, the resolution “was approved by the House within moments of introduction, without any of the lawmakers getting copies of the measure on which they were being asked to vote.” Is it traditional to blindly pass resolutions without reading them? To make matters worse, buyer’s remorse set in immediately, with Gordon Fox’s chief legal council John Flynn pointing out that the resolution was “not properly before the body,” and therefore, presumably, in dispute.

So when Doreen Costa claims that Governor Chafee is “disrespecting” the legislature by not following the resolution’s directive, the immediate question that comes to mind might be, “Is the legislature acting in a way that deserves such respect?”

While people in this state struggle to find jobs, and as families are losing their homes, Representative Costa put her efforts towards passing a useless resolution that seeks to limit the the First Amendment rights of free Americans. Costa, who identifies strongly as a Catholic, introduced the resolution, in her own words, “on a whim,” but was “excited” when it passed.

Whimsy and excitement may be found in holiday themed amusement parks, but are not appropriate in the State Legislature.

Of course, it is not just Doreen Costa complaining. Bishop Tobin, of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Providence, chimed in with “Governor Chafee’s decision to avoid the word Christmas at the State House ceremony is most disheartening and divisive. It is sad that such a secular spirit has swept over our state. The Governor’s decision ignores long held American traditions and is an affront to the faith of many citizens. For the sake of peace and harmony in our state at this special time of the year, I respectfully encourage the Governor to reconsider his decision to use the word Christmas in the state observance.”

The Bishop must surely realize that the “secular spirit” that “swept over this state” did so in in 1663, when the state's founder, Roger Williams, was granted a royal charter that guaranteed complete religious liberty to Rhode Island citizens. It is this secular liberty that allowed those of many faiths, including Catholics, Baptists, Jews, Quakers and even those with no faith, such as Humanists, to prosper in this country.

Bishop Tobin’s position as the highest ranking Catholic cleric in Rhode Island, the most Catholic state in America, is possible only because of Rhode Island’s secular history of religious freedom.

Rhode Island is made up of people with a wide variety of traditions regarding the “holiday season.” Many of these traditions are religious, but many are simply secular observations of traditions long divorced from any spiritual message. Governor Chafee’s decision, rather than being divisive as the Bishop claims, is in fact an attempt at being inclusive. It is a small step towards respecting the beliefs of all Rhode Islanders, not just those of the loud and whimsical religious majority.

James Croft: The Symbolic Poverty & Potential of Humanism - YouTube

2011-11-29T17:59:00.001-05:00

Dessa: Hip-Hop and Humanism

2011-11-27T17:03:00.001-05:00

Dessa

Public Radio International did a little piece about Dessa, a white woman hip-hop artist from Minneapolis. Best bit:

Female hip-hop artists are few and far between. In a field full of rampant misogyny, Dessa noted that most women rappers try to hate women more than the men do, or put women high on a pedestal.

"Neither really spoke to me," Dessa said. "So if I talk about trying to make rent or falling in love and trying to stay that way ... people will say 'I resonate with that human experience.' I've found that humanism is the best feminism."

I'm always happy to hear "humanism" used in such a positive way.

Thanksgiving

2011-11-24T12:33:00.001-05:00

When the Wampanoag helped the Pilgrims survive that first Winter, they had no idea how quickly they would come to regret it. Genocide, inspired by Christianity, was the reward for their compassion.

Humanists of Rhode Island: Rhode Island, Humanism and the Death Penalty

2011-11-20T12:06:00.000-05:00

Humanists of Rhode Island: Rhode Island, Humanism and the Death Penalty

Humanists of Rhode Island

2011-11-20T11:09:00.000-05:00

Humanists of Rhode Island

Petty abuses of power...

2011-11-03T17:33:00.001-04:00

I live on off Hope St, on the east Side of Providence, near Pawtucket. Every day I walk up Hope St., and nearly every day I see the Parking Enforcement people patrolling the area, ticketing cars to increase revenue for the city. Now, there are some good reasons to ticket cars. For instance, if you park too close to the corner, like the car in the picture is, it can make it very difficult for buses and fire trucks to make the corner. In the event of an emergency, first responders might be delayed, and lives lost.

Curiously, this car, which is a car used by Providence Fire Chief, is parked on a corner, and encroaching upon a a pedestrian walkway. The car did not receive a ticket, because the Fire Chief in question is a petty man who abuses his power in this petty way.

There was no emergency, unless getting a good parking spot at one of the many local eateries is an emergency. Who knows? Maybe the Fire Chief's blood sugar was running dangerously low.

But anyone else parking like that would get a ticket, and deserve it.

It would behoove everyone to remember two things: 1. Common courtesy means not parking like an asshole, and 2. No one should be able to flout the law, even in so petty a way.

It sets a bad example, and is the exact opposite of the behavior I expect from our public officials.

In the old days...

2011-11-03T10:28:00.002-04:00

"Doctor" Samuel Blumenfeld

In the good old days, before the Internet, ancient codgers droning on and on about the "good old days" were confined to family gatherings, letters to the editor, supermarket newsweeklies and the tail end of 60 Minutes. Now, those who have mastered the ways of the computer post their ramblings on blogs and FaceBook. At best these reminisces serve as reminders that our memories are selective, and tend to be selectively positive. We all look back to a past that is somehow brighter and more wonderful, if only because the youth and innocence brought to bear can never be recaptured.

At its worst such spewings smack of intolerance, bitterness, ignorance and most of all, fear. Fear of a world very different from the one expected. Fear of a future in which mankind isn't white straight and Christian, but brown, bisexual and secular.

One such codger is Sam Blumenfeld, who was a member of the John Birch Society back when being a Bircher meant something. (It meant you were a nutty, conservative conspiracy theorist mostly, but the Birchers had political clout.) Writing for the conservative New American website. In a rather long, rambling essay about Christian based homeschooling, Sam writes about the good old days when public education was a good thing:

...we all learned reading, writing, and arithmetic. And because we could read, we then learned history and geography. We learned all about the history of New York and its five boroughs. Even though economic times were tough, it was a happy time for us kids. No one had dyslexia, or ADD, or ADHD. No one was on Ritalin. There was no sex ed or death ed or drug ed, no multiculturalism, no values clarification, no secular humanism. The schools did not try to undermine our religious beliefs or morals. They were teaching us to become good patriotic Americans. Since most of us came from immigrant families, becoming good Americans was very important. The only decoration in our classroom was a portrait of George Washington. Moreover, biblical religion was respected, and the principal recited the 23rd Psalm at each assembly.

It's easy to make fun of this passage, with it's anti-Humanist, anti-Science, anti-American message. Denying the existence of dyslexia in the 1930's is like denying the existence of leukemia in the 1330's. How could anyone be diagnosed with a condition no one had discovered yet? But we should remember that just as this old man's views are still around to haunt us today, so will the views of the ignorant and prejudiced still be with us eighty year from now.

Looking forward to the year 2100, a year I will never see, I can be assured of one fact: Someone alive today, someone whose head is being filled with dangerous fantasies about the nature of reality, will be ushering in a new century, just as Osama bin Laden helped to usher in the one we live in now.

This person will believe in Biblical inerrancy, corporal punishment for children, Creationism, prayer, miracles and all manner of other dangerous ideas. Others will believe in child marriage, female genital mutilation, stoning as punishment for adultery, and Sharia Law. For many it will be a dark, scary, demon-haunted world.

Still others, though, will believe in science, reason, compassion and humanism. For them, the world will be a work in progress. These future people will, perhaps, benefit from the work we do today to combat prejudice and ignorance. The institutions we build today that are devoted to the positive ideals of Humanism may help future generations in their quest for a better world.

As for Sam Blumenfeld, I'm reminded of the portrait Marge Simpson did of an old, frail Mr. Burns on an episode of The Simpsons. One observer, finally grokking the message of the painting, said, ""He's bad, but he'll die soon... so I like it!"

When Susan Sarandon said the Pope was a Nazi, she wasn't wrong...

2011-10-18T12:02:00.000-04:00

Apparently actor Susan Sarandon said that the present Pope was a Nazi. Not withstanding the smart idea that giving too much regard to the statements of actors is a big mistake because no matter how famous one is, fame does not equal insight, the fact remains that Sarandon is correct. Ratzinger was indeed once a Nazi. Stauch defender of all things Catholic, Bill Donohue of the Catholic League, said:

Susan Sarandon’s ignorance is willful: those who have hatred in their veins are not interested in the truth. The fact is that Joseph Ratzinger (the pope) was conscripted at the age of 14 into the Hitler Youth, along with every other young German boy. Unlike most of the other teenagers, Ratzinger refused to go to meetings, bringing economic hardship to his family. Moreover, unlike most of the others, he deserted at the first opportunity.

So Ratzinger was not a willing Nazi, and surely his experiences lead him to a greater understanding of the kind of evil the Nazi's represented. Sadly, the actual case is more nuanced:

While saying Ratzinger was "only briefly a member of the Hitler Youth, and not an enthusiastic one," John L. Allen Jr., author of a 2000 biography of the then-cardinal and Vatican correspondent for the National Catholic Reporter, faults Ratzinger for the lessons he took--or didn't take--from the war years.

Traunstein, the city in which the Ratzingers lived, saw its fair share of World War II and the Holocaust, Allen writes. Anti-Semitic violence, displacement and deportation, death, and resistance turned a quiet city into what one journalist Allen cites called "an over-populated lunatic asylum of hopeless inhabitants."

And yet, Allen continues, Ratzinger's memories of the time make it sound as if this chaos were "out there," not in his world of school, literature, music, and family.

"Though Ratzinger has offered many details from the war years about army service, about schooling, and so on, it is striking that he leaves out any mention of these upheavals," Allen writes

Allen believes Ratzinger's main lessons from the period involved the Church and the need for fidelity to its teachings as a counter to dangers like Nazism. He came away from the Third Reich believing Catholicism represented the main source of resistance to the Nazis.

Ratzinger is not a Nazi. But he does promote policies that lead to the spread of AIDs, the second class treatment of women, and the destruction of homosexual rights, so he's doing his best.

Skeptic Michael Shermer: Not So Much...

2011-10-14T23:53:00.001-04:00

I love Skeptic magazine.

Founded by Michael Shermer as an alternative to Skeptical Inquirer, it applied the tools of science and reason not just to pseudoscience and bigfootery but to issues such as historical revisionism and the nature of belief. When the skeptical movement was still mired in psychics and UFOs, Skeptic widened the scope into things that mattered, like politics and religion. I still remember fondly an article written by Michal Shermer, talking about Ayn Rand's Objectivist views, and why her followers were cult-like in their adoration for her. He spoke of his own cult-like attitude towards Rand, and how he eventually used reason to break free of its grasp.

Yet Shermer did not completely reject Randian economics, and still identifies as a Libertarian. I have a hard time understanding how smart, skeptical people can embrace Libertarian philosophy and economics, given how little evidence there is in favor of it and how much evidence there is against it. Take this as an example of my bias if you like, but I contend that I will be happy to be proven wrong on this point, if compelling evidence is presented.

It was this that went through my mind when I read the following Tweet from Shermer:

The link takes you to the picture at the top of this posting.

The photo is from someone claiming that the Occupy (or 99%) movement does not represent them, and the argument presented is that this person feels that hard work will pay off, especially if he/she keeps their aspirations low and reasonable. There is much to the idea of taking personal responsibility, (a very admirable trait that Libertarians have claimed for their own) but the argument misses it's mark, because Occupy has never asked for a free lunch or a hand out, it's simply asking that the system be more fair.

Shermer completely betrays his avowed skepticism with his snarky comment. True, we don't expect nuance and depth from a Twitter post, but we do expect consistency and truth.

Let's look at the picture skeptically.

The person who wrote this, if it is the same person who held it for the camera, does not show his or her face. When we look at the series of 99% photos this is supposed to parody or comment on, we'll see that the vast majority of the Occupy crowd shows their faces in their pictures. The person in Shermer's picture chose not to. That's suspicious, because it makes it difficult to check on the person's story and veracity. if the person is misrepresenting their story, who is going to identify him/her and expose the lie? As should be evident, we can't even identify this person's gender.

This photo is very popular on Tea Party websites, because it takes the position that hard work pays off, and implies that the Occupy movement disdains hard work. I haven't seen any evidence that the protesters are looking for handouts from the government, so this generalization rings false and hollow. Though I can't speak for a movement so vast, I understand that they want fair taxes for everyone, an end to corporate interference in our democracy, and a government that does something real about the problems we're facing economically.

Shermer's unthinking comment betrays his ignorance and his prejudices. He proves he has no inkling of what Occupy is really about, and he shows his economic bias towards an unproven and perhaps dangerous economic ideology. He shows no skepticism, just a knee-jerk, visceral reaction to something he doesn't like on the basis of his biases.

As a fan of Shermer's work, it's disappointing to see him fall so far.

Superhero sighting at Occupy Wall St

2011-10-14T08:57:00.002-04:00

You know you're right when the Superheroes arrive to support the cause. Her name and powers are unknown, but this mysterious lady avenger in her red, white and blue uniform dazzled the crowd when he descended from the heavens.

Rhode Island’s Future - Voter ID Laws Serve Only One Purpose: To Disenfranchise Voters

2011-10-06T12:27:00.000-04:00

Rhode Island’s Future - Voter ID Laws Serve Only One Purpose: To Disenfranchise Voters

What is Blasphemy?

2011-09-30T13:49:00.000-04:00

Today is International Blasphemy Rights Day, declared by the CFI to take place every September 30 to commemorate the publication of the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons that caused such a furor and ruckus, led to terrible riots and deaths throughout the Muslim world, and is responsible for sending several cartoonists into Salmon Rushdie-like conditions of anonymity and fear. Too often the charge of blasphemy is used to squelch the free speech rights of people who are expressing opinions contrary to those in power, whether governmental or religious in nature.

As a Humanist and atheist, I support a person’s right to mock, ridicule and parody any and all beliefs, including religious belief, in short, I support the right to blaspheme. Indeed, since there is no God, I agree with the idea that blasphemy is literally a victimless crime.

I would like to suggest a different, variant definition of blasphemy. Blasphemy is usually used in it’s primary sense as an act that is insulting to or lacking respect for God or the sacred. I would maintain that as a Humanist, though I hold there is no God I do hold some things sacred, and that it is possible to commit acts that violate my sense of the sacred.

Sacred is a loaded word, full of religious import, so I want to make sure that readers know that I am not using this word lightly, or in any religious or dualist sense. I maintain that my ethics have been derived completely within a secular, reason-based and naturalistic sense, and these beliefs have lead me to some conclusions regarding morality that are as close to certain as it is possible to be. For instance, I believe strongly in a person’s basic human rights, and hold these ideas as sacred.

So to me it is blasphemy when parents allows their infant son to die because of their beliefs in the power of faith healing, as did Dale and Shannon Hickman in Oregon. They allowed an infant to suffer and die rather than to use their faculties of reason to spare and save him. It was a monstrous act of religiously motivated hubris, and it was wrong.

It’s the height of blasphemy to believe that God will rescue the economy, rather than to take logical, simple steps to save it. We have a collapsing infrastructure, and the need for jobs, so:

Within the reality-based community, this situation represents a true no-brainer. As economist Dean Baker writes, “We know how to get out of this mess, we have known how for 70 years. We just need the government to generate demand. That means spending money."

Unfortunately, only 20% of Americans have a purely secular view of the economy. Another 20%:

as USA Today reporter Cathy Lynn Grossman put it, “combine a view of God as actively engaged in the daily workings of the world with an economic conservative view that opposes government regulation and champions the free market as a matter of faith.” Sociologist Paul Froese, co-author of the Baylor study, told USA Today, "They think the economy works because God wants it to work. It's a new religious economic idealism," with politicians "invoking God while chanting 'less government'."

The latter attitude, to my mind, is blasphemy. Such an attitude prevents the entire country from moving forward with real solutions to real problems, which perpetuates real suffering for people all over the world.

Supreme Court Judge Clarence Thomas commits blasphemy when he sits on the bench as a supposedly impartial jurist even as he fills his coffers with $700,000 payments to his wife from conservative interests. I would also suggest such actions rise to the level of treason.

In Pakistan, a ten year old girl was beaten and expelled from school because she misspelled a word and her teachers decided this mistake rose to the level of blasphemy. She wrote, in Arabic, the word “curse” instead of “hymn.” The only blasphemy committed in that school that day was by the authorities that beat an innocent girl for a simple, literally childish mistake.

Meanwhile hear in America, at a rally to honor a 14 year old boy who was bullied to death by his virulently anti-gay peers, those same bullies allegedly chanted “We’re glad you’re dead.” Blasphemy.

These stories are just from the last couple of days. There are many more. Those who deny human caused global warming, those who insist on the death penalty, those who support the war on drugs, those who want prayers on the walls of schools, those who support torture, or oppose equal rights for gays, minorities or women, they are all guilty of true blasphemy, because the victims of their acts are not invisible sky daddies, but real people, suffering real injustice and pain.

God, even if he exists, can handle himself, and suffer a few insults. If he can’t, he’s not much of a god at all, is he? But humans need all the help they can get, and when you deny that, you are guilty of real blasphemy.

Christians should Apologize... for Apologetics

2011-09-27T13:46:00.000-04:00

DefendChristians.org describes themselves as "A Ministry of the Christian Anti-Defamation Commission" and take the somewhat improbable stance that Christians in the United States are a sort of persecuted minority whose rights need defending. To make their case the group very often engages in misrepresentations of topical news stories, framing the gay marriage issue, for instance, as an assault on a Christian's right to discriminate. Led by Gary Cass with a panicky nervousness and false earnestness, the group's only redeeming feature seems to be that it is very tiny.

On September 26th the group posted a "commentary" that shines an interesting light on their thinking entitled "Understanding Our Time: Philosophy." Reading the piece, one cannot help but feel that they are witnessing not so much a defense of the Christian faith from a staunch believer, but the argument within the mind of a believer about the nature of their own faith versus reason. The opening line says it well:

Christianity begins with God’s revealed Word and does not pretend to start with independent reason or the scientific inquiry.

Lest we think that the author is throwing all reason and scientific inquiry under the bus in favor of an "anything goes" kind of mentality, there is a clarification later on:

All philosophies begin with a set of assumptions that can’t be proven. The non-believer as well as the believer starts with a commitment to some ultimate authority. For the Christian it should be the Word of God, for the unbeliever it’s ultimately his own mind. Either you are a law unto yourselves (auto-nomy) or you are under God’s revealed will (theo-nomy).

These are some bold and completely unsupported statements. It's also difficult to know exactly what the author means by, "All philosophies begin with a set of assumptions that can’t be proven." What exactly is meant by the word "proven?" I think that the author believes that we can't know with absolute certainty that anything is true, and I would agree with this. All belief is conditional on evidence, and new evidence allows us the opportunity to alter our beliefs. When Keanu woke up from the Matrix, new evidence allowed him to revise his understanding of reality. But in the hear and now it's hard to conceive of an experiment that would prove that we live in some sort of virtual reality rather than "real" reality.

But is absolute certainty about reality necessary? Just because all philosophies begin with a set of assumptions that can’t be proven, it doesn't follow that all sets of assumptions are equally possible, likely, or worthy of consideration. For an atheist/naturalist/humanist, the baseline assumption is that the universe is pretty much in line with the way we experience it to be. Sure, our senses are faulty, our point of view is tiny, and our theories are tentative, but through hard work, observation, experiment and deep thought, we have peeled back at least some of the universe's mysteries. But our beliefs are vulnerable to new information, and if one day we wake up from the Matrix, we'll incorporate that fact as best as our limited brains can manage into our revised world view.

As for the next part of the quote, the claim is made that Christians do not rely on their faulty brains for ultimate meaning, but on the Word of God, as revealed through the Bible. This statement is so lacking in sense that it is hard to know where exactly to start in pulling it apart. Are Christians able to make an end run around their own minds and brains to somehow connect directly with the Word of God? Doesn't a person need eyes to read it, ears to hear it, and brains to decipher the words into meaning? If the argument is that ultimate authority comes from either the Word of God or one's own mind, isn't that the same thing since our own minds ultimately make the decision to accept or reject beliefs?

In other words, if I decide not to think for myself, I'm still making at least one decision, and that decision requires that I think for myself.

The Christian knows he can’t rely on his fallen mind. He humbly relies on what God has revealed based on the assumption that God will not mislead his people.

Yikes. How is claiming to know God's mind and purpose "humble" by the way?

Ultimately, the author is launching an attack on science.

Christianity and science go hand in hand. With good science, God’s general revelation in nature will agree with God’s special revelation in scripture. There is only one truth. All truth is God’s truth.

Even non-Christian scientists who believe that the universe is the product of time and chance must reject that assumption and assume the Christian point of view to do their science.

Christian assumptions create the environment where we can do science.

And what kind of science?

The Teleological Argument, creation has a designer and purpose.

The Cosmological Argument, the universe ultimately has a “first cause.”

The Second Law of Thermal Dynamics shows the universe is running down, therefore not eternal.

The impossibility of spontaneously generated life by the findings of microbiology with the high degree of complexity and pre-existing information found within DNA. This is supported by the impossibility based on mathematical probabilities, and the problem of too little time

The Anthropic Principle shows how magnificently fine-tuned the universe is in order to support life on earth.

Of course, none of this is even remotely scientific. Though I won't get into it here even a cursory examination of these arguments from a non-partisan (non-theistic) viewpoint will reveal their gaping holes and illogical nature. But one thing I will say: Just because we don't know something doesn't mean we can't know something, and even if some things can't be known, it doesn't necessarily follow that there needs to be a God who does.

The last part of the rather long piece I'd like to address is the author's uninformed attack on Secular Humanism, complete with a quote from Carl Sagan:

The assumption of secular humanism is that the material world is all there is and whatever exists can be explained by natural causes. There is no personality, soul, God, etc. Yet secularists can’t resist delving into metaphysics or religion/philosophy. Meta means above and physics refers to the physical world.

Humanism does not deny the existence of "personality." Most reject the concept of God, and many reject the idea of a soul.

Secularists must assume the cosmos came into being by accident and all that exists is the eternal, material world, but they can’t prove it scientifically. “Nature is an endless series of efficient causes. She cannot create but she eternally transforms. There was no beginning and there can be no end.” (Carl Sagan)

The phrase "came into being by accident" is imprecise. It would be more accurate to describe the universe as without cause. The claim that such views cannot be proven scientifically is at best short-sighted, and at worst wrong. We can't prove these theories yet, and no matter what is "proved" all science is conditional on our best evidence, which can be updated and changed. The quote from Sagan, used in this context, is literally casting a pearl before swine.

They declare that body and personality live together and therefore die together. There is no immortal human soul. A person is merely a machine, just like a computer. Life’s “purpose” is reduced to survival and procreation.

When it comes to souls, or the mind/body problem, Humanists have a range of beliefs. My only caveat here is that rather than say "body and personality live together and therefore die together" I'd say that mind is generated by the body.

Science is the basis for human knowledge and serves as the religion of humanism.

Science is not the religion of Humanism. That's just stupid. Science is the best basis by which we can claim to know things, and science has made the world a better place. (Just ask the millions of mothers and babies alive today because science learned that washing our hands before childbirth can prevent disease.)

Its ethic is man should be devoted to the progress of humanity based on reason and science. But why? If life is just eternal, accidental, random transformation, there is no reason, or science or ethics.

What a mess of words this bit is. No one claims that life is eternal. And the process of evolution (which is what I think the author is getting at here) though random, is described and understood through reason and science. The other part of this, that a godless universe is ultimately nihilistic, (therefore bereft of ethics) is equally insipid. Humans are capable of creating ethical systems by which to live. In fact, given that in reality there is no God, all ethical systems are actually human made.

There's a lot more to this "commentary" that I just can't get to, lest this posting run even longer than it is. When this kind of poor reasoning and deceptive writing is passed off as philosophy, it does immeasurable harm. First, the information, intentionally or not, is wrong. Secondly, readers who are uniformed or unused to this kind of polemic might come to think of such drivel as actual philosophy, which it most clearly is not.

Elizabeth Warren cuts to the chase

2011-09-21T15:15:00.001-04:00

Class Warfare? Let's count the dead...

2011-09-21T12:44:00.001-04:00

The charge is class warfare. Any sentiment that expresses the idea that rich people somehow don't deserve their money, or hints at "redistribution" of wealth is immediately pounced upon as being unfair on some level. The rich, it is maintained, have earned their money, and they maintain the right to use it any way they want. Qwest Communications International Inc, for instance, spent $377, 232 to shuttle chief exec Richard Notebaert around in a corporate jet in 2003. Had Notebaert flown every single day in 2003, to the tune of $200 a day by taking commercial flights, he would have saved his company $300, 000. And this is just one executive and one company. Multiply that waste by a thousand, or even ten thousand, to get an idea of the obscene waste such expenditures represents.

Meanwhile, a Picasso, Nude, Green Leaves and Bust sold at Christie's for a record 106 million dollars. Art sales to and from private collectors is a multi-billion dollar international business.

Now let's look at how much it costs to save the life of one person. One thousand women die every day to preventable causes during pregnancy and childbirth according to the World Health Organization. For $11 one can donate three emergency birthing kits. If the kits are only 33% effective, you can save one life for about ten bucks.

So how much does the corporate jet cost really? Thirty thousand dead mothers. That Picasso, which I think we can all agree is brilliant, but over priced? Ten million, six hundred thousand dead mothers.

I would encourage you, as you go through the day, and see the wasteful spending of the very rich, to divide the price tag by ten, and calculate how many dead mothers and children might be alive today if the purchaser had made different choices. When you watch television and see the rich and glamorous sporting their pearls and designer dresses, their luxury yachts and their fancy cars, do a quick calculation, and figure out how many have died needlessly to support their lavish lifestyles. It quickly becomes apparent that the lifestyles of the rich and famous are built upon the graves of the poor.

The difference in price between a fully loaded Lexus and a fully loaded Prius is about $65,000. That's six thousand five hundred dead. Well worth it for that touch of class and luxury.

On being one of "those" Atheists

2011-09-20T14:54:00.002-04:00

Rose Marie Belforti will not let you marry this cow.

I linked a story to FaceBook on September 16 about Rose Marie Belforti, a Ledyard, NY town clerk who refused to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples (despite a recent New York law that allows such marriages) and made the comment that “Religion is little more than a shield to hide your bigotry behind.”

Having thought about it for a while, I stand by the remark, perhaps with the caveat that religion isn’t always used to justify bigotry, but too often it is, and I maintain that religion is the greatest source of bigotry in the world. Now people of good conscience can take issue with this statement, and I’m prepared to defend and debate my point of view, and even be persuaded to the contrary in the face of facts and reasonable argument.

But instead of any arguments, I was hit with this comment, from a good friend,

Steve, you’re in danger of becoming one of “those” Atheists - equally bigoted **against** religion

My reply addressed the fundamental point of my comment as regards the linked article. I said,

So religion bears no blame for this? Give me the secular argument against LGBT marriage. There isn’t one. Sure, bad people can be bad without religion, but good people can be bad with it.

I felt that I sufficiently answered the comment, but something bothered me about it, and I’ve been letting the exchange percolate for days and reflection has brought me to several conclusions. As I consider the person who made the comment a good friend, I do not say these things with the intent to hurt him or single him out, but the following points need to be made. Putting aside the patronizing tone of the comment, here are my thoughts.

When I see bigotry, I point it out. Rose Marie Belforti, in denying marriage licenses, might be a Christian, and she might truly believe that she is entitled to deny people the right to marry, but she IS A BIGOT. Just because she gets her views from her church, her Bible, her God or her conscience does not make her less of one. If she were denying marriage licenses to a mixed race couple, her bigotry would be obvious.

I don’t believe my friend was defending bigotry. He was arguing that my comment, rather than attacking this this particular woman’s abhorrent beliefs was done as a blanket condemnation of all religion. In lumping all religion in with the beliefs of this New York nitwit, I am being unfair to those with religious beliefs that are in no way so bigoted. That’s a point, but FaceBook is not the place for nuance. Read the story I linked to and try not to be angry. Listen to Rose Marie’s excuse and try not to dismiss her ignorance and views as powerfully as possible.

Then remember that religious people without bigotry are the exception, not the rule. The vast majority of people on this planet are religious. The vast majority of the religious hold negative views about people who are different from them on the basis of race, gender, sexual orientation and dozens of other attributes. The comment was an attempt to turn my charge of bigotry around, and brand me as some sort of secular bigot. What does that even mean? That I’m partial to reason, to tolerance, to freedom and human rights? Just as one should not be tolerant of intolerance, one cannot be bigoted against bigots.

I was also warned, in this comment, against becoming one of “those” Atheists. I imagined someone in the 1960’s telling Harvey Milk that he was in danger of becoming one of “those” homosexuals, or someone telling Martin Luther King he was one of “those” Negroes. While I am not going to be so presumptuous as to compare myself with such illustrious figures, I will point out that what the adjective “those” means in this case is “uppity,” “vocal” and not willing to accept the status quo. “Those” atheists are not afraid to state plainly the truth of what they see: That religious belief is no excuse for ignorance and bigotry.

The use of the term “those” was an attempt to shame me. I was suppose to suddenly realize that I had broken the boundaries of society. I was expected to bow in reverential respect to religion in general, because that’s what society demands. I’m allowed to critique, but I have to do so respectfully and humbly, because religion has such a long history of power and influence, and because it is so dear and so central to the lives of so many.

Well fuck that.

Being polite and deferential gets you nothing. In order to advance a civil right you have to be loud, and you have to demand it. The status quo is what it is because no one attempts to change it.Gay marriage didn’t pass in New York because LGBTs sat around patiently waiting for the world to notice them. The civil rights movement of the sixties, or the advancement of women’s rights, even now under attack by religious fundamentalists, did not spring into being because white male Americans suddenly realized it was the right thing to do. It happened because someone grabbed America by the scruff of the neck, and stuck its nose into its racism and sexism until the smell became unbearable.

An atheist in America can no more be bigoted against the religious than an untouchable in India could be bigoted against the Brahmins. The structure of power in this society is such that most people in public positions do their best to hide their religious doubts, if they have any. Unbelievers are among the most unpopular groups in America, and open Atheists are very unlikely to be elected to office. Religious language permeates our culture. It’s on our money, and in our legislatures.

I am always polite when discussing my beliefs. But I am also honest, forthright and unyielding in my defense of them. Occasionally, when someone declares a belief, someone else might take offense. The very act of declaring oneself a Jew in the same breath denies the divinity of Christ. The act of declaring oneself a Catholic denies the truth of the Koran. Being a Muslim denies the existence of thousands of Hindu gods. This is a veritable parade of insults to religious beliefs, made by religious believers.

So yes, I’m one of “those” atheists, but I’m not bigoted against religion (which makes as much sense as being bigoted against race, or politics, or economics, actually). I simply see it for what it is.

Atheists are as big a threat as climate change deniers?

2011-09-19T16:50:00.000-04:00

Frank Skinner is a comedian little known in the States, but popular enough in Britain, so of course he can always back up, and claim he was joking.

Atheists we might see as people like those who deny global warming. You might celebrate their right, and defend their freedom of speech, to deny global warming – but if they're wrong, and millions of other people have taken their view, then it could end in a terrible, terrible disaster for a lot of people.

Skinner has dredged up here the long refuted argument of Blaise Pascal who claimed that if you declare you're an atheist and you're wrong, you'll spend eternity in Hell. It makes sense, therefore, to accept religion to avoid that terrible fate. The problems with "Pascal's Wager" are numerous, for instance, even if Pascal is right, which of the many religions that talk about Hell should I follow? This is a problem even for Frank Skinner, who's a Catholic. Imagine his surprise when he meets Allah in the afterlife rather than Jesus.

Skinner isn't satisfied to merely slander atheists as ignorant and dangerous. He wants to unite the world's religion in an effort to combat them:

At a time when secularism is a threat to the salvation of millions, believers should get together, find what we have in common, and sell that.

Skinner's idea is that Catholics and Muslims, Buddhists and Jehovah's Witnesses, Jains and Calvinists, Evangelicals and Jews should just set aside their differences and come up with a new product, a new super religion and sell that.

Well that's actually happened already. When you subtract out the differences in every religion, and when you clear away all the places where the various mythologies conflict with each other, you end up with just a few ideas, which can be summarized pretty easily:

There may or may not be a God. Either way, he isn't going to help you. Our best bet to survive as a species is for people to be nice to each other and work together in peace to solve our problems.

Frank Skinner isn't a deep thinker. As a comic, he may or may not be funny (I'd never heard of him before I read this piece) but his theological and philosophical thinking skills are for shit.

The thing is, I’m not sure. I see myself as a man of doubt. Doubt is at the centre of being human. I wonder about fundamentalists who don’t have doubt – or atheists who don’t have doubt… There are days when I think I’m wrong. I think it’s OK to think that.

He's so close. Doubt is fundamental to a secular point of view. He claims atheists are certain, but they aren't. Atheists and freethinkers hold their views conditionally, as the best answer to the questions we have so far. religious faith asks us to believe without reason. And without reason, what do you have? Skinner explains:

If you believe in God all bets are off. The Red Sea can part. There’s a temptation to give a bit of ground to rationality. But if you believe in God, why shouldn’t there be angels?

Sure, and why shouldn't there be all manner of other ridiculous beliefs? If you believe in God, why not fly planes into buildings, burn witches at the stake, rape children and then pray for forgiveness? If anything is possible, what does it matter what we do? God and faith can repair any mistake.

The kind of poor thinking evidenced by Frank Skinner, which resulted several times in applause from the appreciative audience is endemic among the religiously minded. Arguments are turned inside out, and insanity becomes the norm. Worse still, Frank Skinner said all this on stage in conversation with the Archbishop of Canterbury. The Archbishop would have known that the audience was being fed the very worst kind of ignorant, populist theology, and he said nothing to rein in conversation. Perhaps it's a bit much to hope that the most rational man in the room would be the highest ranking religious authority in Britain.

James Croft: Good (without god); CFI Leadership Conference 2011

2011-09-19T14:42:00.002-04:00

Abortion

2011-09-18T10:58:00.001-04:00

Number the children of Levi after the house of their fathers, by their families: every male from a month old and upward shalt thou number them. And Moses numbered them according to the word of the LORD. -- Numbers 3:15-16

This little quoted passage from the The Old Testament is interesting, because it seems to put to a lie the contention by most Christians that humanity begins at conception. Here's God Himself, telling Moses to not consider male children under one month old when conducting a census. (It also, significantly, does not consider female children of any age.)

I would contend that due to high infant mortality rates in a bronze age era when few knew to wash their hands before eating, getting too emotionally attached to a baby under a month old was a bad idea. In a sense, the baby was not yet real because there was no guarantee that it would survive for long. After a month, the baby's odds would go up, and suddenly you might be able to count on the kid being around at age five, fifteen and twenty-five. The kid becomes worth investing emotion in, the baby becomes viable.

With the advent of medical technology and science, unavailable to the writers of the Bible, fetuses are now viable ( with loads of expensive medical help) after six months or so in the womb. As a result, viability as been pushed back four months, to the beginning of the third trimester.

What is interesting is what has been lost in the abortion debate. The Bible says that a baby under one month old is not in a sense human. An argument can be made that this is due to the issue of viability. The Supreme Court of the United States, in making it's historic decision of Roe v. Wade, also used viability as a demarcation, but due to the triumph of medical knowledge and science, was able to extend the definition of humanity back four months.

Anti-abortion advocates who try to push humanity back to conception are entertaining ideas so outrageous that they did not even occur to the writers of the Bible, and there were few ideas so outrageous that the Biblical writers wouldn't use them. I mean, have you actually read the thing?

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Michele Bachmann's Criminal Idiocy

2011-09-13T20:59:00.002-04:00


She doesn't care who lives or dies, she just wants to be President.

Michele Bachmann is an idiot, as is anyone who would think of supporting her effort to become president of the United States. In every way that counts, her views are monstrous. And though she may be actually believe the lies she tells, her ignorance and stupidity are no excuse for endangering the lives of young women everywhere. After going after Gov. perry for mandating the HPV vaccine in Texas, she claimd on Fox News and the Today Show that a woman came up to her after the debate and told Bachmann that her "little daughter took that vaccine, that injection, and she suffered from mental retardation thereafter."

One minute of research would have put this dangerous fear mongering to rest. There is no reported case of a young woman becoming mentally retarded after an HPV vaccine. None. However, there is plenty of evidence that the HPV vaccine prevents cervical cancer, which kills lots of young women, about 4,200 a year.

“There is absolutely no scientific validity to this statement,” O. Marion Burton, president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, said in a statement. “Since the vaccine has been introduced, more than 35 million doses have been administered, and it has an excellent safety record.”

Of course, Bachmann doesn't care if her information is true or not. She only wants to fan fears of vaccines among the voters stupid enough to support Perry for President over her. She doesn't care that falsely claiming that vaccines are unsafe leads to deaths from easily preventable diseases. According to the Tuscon Citizen:

Suspicion of vaccines has helped to fuel outbreaks of a number of infectious diseases in recent years, including measles, mumps and whooping cough, according to the CDC. The CDC has tracked at least 193 cases of measles so far this year — three times more than all of last year combined.

When people lie, people die. Bachmann's brand of idiocy is almost criminal.

If Rick Santorum doesn't want to be known as a bigot, he should stop being one

2011-09-01T17:39:00.002-04:00

From CNN:

"I had Piers Morgan call me a bigot, because I believe what the Catholic Church teaches with respect to homosexuality," [Rick] Santorum said, heatedly. "So now I'm a bigot because I believe what the Bible teaches."

Santorum got it exactly right. He is a bigot because he believes what the Catholic Church and the Bible teaches. End of story.

Splotch on Pavement resembles Jesus

2011-09-01T12:27:00.000-04:00

From 33TV.com:

For more than the 18 months [Mary Vasquez] and her husband, Ruben, have lived in this 100 Center apartment, she had never noticed the sign.

Then one morning a couple of weeks ago, Mary Vasquez was watering her plants when she glanced down and then jumped back.

There, in a pattern on the concrete of her patio, she spotted a small image of Jesus’ face.

She tried scrubbing it off with soap, but it’s still there.

Excited, she called to her husband, who sees it, too.

Her grown children came over — "Look! Come and see!" she told them — and were apparently impressed enough to urge her to call the newspaper.

Here's what bothers me:

1. It doesn't look like Jesus, or anything else. really.

2. If I thought it looked like Jesus, and worth calling the news about, why would I try"scrubbing it off with soap?"

ChipIn: Jessica's RI ACLU Fundraiser Ad

2011-09-01T07:19:00.000-04:00

ChipIn: Jessica's RI ACLU Fundraiser Ad

At the Rite Aid Pharmacy, East Ave, Pawtucket

2011-08-31T14:02:00.002-04:00

I found it odd to walk into the Rite Aid Pharmacy near my house, and see a rack of books completely dedicated to Christianity. Aside from the small (and shrinking) magazine section, these were the only books in the store.

More odd, there is a bargain book table in the store. They are also all Christian books.

A sampling of some of the books. It's a disturbing mixture of kids books Christian care tactics. I guess they're one and the same?:

Why can these books succeed in such a venue while books of a secular nature cannot? I can think of two possible reasons for this:

1. A pharmacy has a older customer base, and older people tend to be more religious. Also, pharmacies cater to people with illnesses, and at such times many might find solace in religious messages, however trite.

2. People with a secular bent tend to be better educated, and better educated people can find the books they want through Amazon or other distribution channels. They are less likely to wander past a bin full of bargain science titles and find something they like.

The other disturbing thing about these books is that they have a decidedly conservative bent to them I know that Rite Aid has a good policy about diversity, at least on their website:

Diversity expands beyond race, religion, color, sex (including gender and sexual orientation), disability, age, or national origin. It also includes differences such as corporate tenure, marital status, personal beliefs, and education level. At Rite Aid, we embrace our differences and strive to create an environment where every associate is valued individually and as a team member, treated with respect, and encouraged to do his or her best work.

Why would they want to insult their customers and staff with books that argue homosexuality is a sin?

Forces of Geek: Celebrate Your Pop Culture Obsessions!: Star Trek: The First Thirty Seconds

2011-08-22T17:22:00.000-04:00

Forces of Geek: Celebrate Your Pop Culture Obsessions!: Star Trek: The First Thirty Seconds

Humanists of Rhode Island: Our Second Habitat Build

2011-08-22T14:22:00.000-04:00

Humanists of Rhode Island: Our Second Habitat Build

Rhode Island’s Future - What, Exactly, is the Secular Case Against Abortion?

2011-08-18T11:41:00.000-04:00

Rhode Island’s Future - What, Exactly, is the Secular Case Against Abortion?

Good Works: Humanists of Rhode Island Volunteer for Habitat for Humanity

2011-08-17T15:54:00.000-04:00

Good Works: Humanists of Rhode Island Volunteer for Habitat for Humanity

Rhode Island’s Future - At the "Civil Rights Under Attack" forum

2011-07-27T22:47:00.000-04:00

Rhode Island’s Future - At the "Civil Rights Under Attack" forum

The Center of the Moral Universe

2011-07-27T10:35:00.001-04:00

If our first priority is pleasing God, however such a term is to be defined, and we do so with zeal and commitment, why would any apologies become necessary? If some people are hurt in the performance of our duties to the Most High, doesn't that become part of the necessary evil built into the foundations of God's plan?

These thoughts occurred to me as I read about a shocking documentary that aired on Australian television the other night. The description of the atrocities committed by the Catholic Church remind one of the tortures of the Inquisition, but these acts all occurred within our lifetimes:

More than 150,000 young women across Australia had their children taken from them at birth without their consent, a new documentary has shown.

An investigation into the practice by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) has uncovered how for years young and usually unmarried women were subjected to forced adoptions in Catholic-run hospitals that resulted in them never seeing their child again.

Many interviewees told ABC they had their legs shackled and were drugged during their labour. The majority were prevented from seeing their children being born or even holding them afterwards.

Many of the women said they believed their children had been selected for forced adoption long before their birth and they were warned they could not oppose the decision.

In a report quoted in The Daily Telegraph, Juliette Clough - one of the young woman interviewed by ABC - told the inquiry she was just 16 years when she gave birth to her son in a Catholic hospital in 1970.

'My ankles were strapped to the bed, they were in stirrups and I was gassed, I had plenty of gas and they just snatched away the baby.

'You weren't allowed to see him or touch him, anything like that, or hold him and it was just like a piece of my soul had died and it's still dead.'

Lily Arthur, now a member of the forced adoption support group Origins NSW, was 17 and a ward of the state when she gave birth in 1967. She agreed to give up her child under threat of being imprisoned.

'When we were going to deliver the child we were put in a position where we couldn't see the delivery of the child. After my son was born I was nearly knocked unconscious and transported to a ward without my child.'

Some women reportedly lost more than one child to the program, their children been sent away to families deemed more suitable by the Church.

In response to these allegations, the Catholic Church has apologized.

'We acknowledge the pain of separation and loss felt then and felt now by the mothers, fathers, children, families and others involved in the practices of the time,' the apology read. 'For this pain we are genuinely sorry.'

Oddly, many modern Catholics get angry when you characterize their church as a medieval, criminal, misogynist cult of baby stealing child rapists. They still maintain that the Catholic Church is somehow the center of the Moral Universe.

Our best selves are revealed through our natures

2011-07-26T20:23:00.001-04:00

Apparently, a person's brain works hard to empathize or understand what it's like to walk in other people's shoes, no matter how different they may be, a new study indicates.

More and more the advances we are making in neuroscience are showing that human beings are hardwired to be altruistic, sharing and compassionate. Doesn't this put to a lie the Christian view that we are all born with corrupted souls, or the Libertarian view that selfishness, however enlightened, is virtuous? These ideas have for centuries caused human kind to turn from their better selves.

It is time to be who we are meant to be: caring, generous, rational and brave.

Trading one addiction for another: Is this all religion can offer?

2011-07-25T09:00:00.000-04:00

A former British television star named Danniella Westbrook has found God, in the United States. According to The Daily Mirror:

The former cocaine addict, whose nose was ravaged by snorting, says she is dedicating her life to the church after being saved by Jesus Christ – finding a new life she could not find in rehab or therapy.

I've often claimed that people come to religion out of desperation, and this story in no way makes me feel otherwise. Danniella and her husband Kevin had reached a sort of existential crisis:

Their conversion followed a hellish period in which Kevin had lost his business during the property crash and their family almost fell apart.

Kevin, who still works in property, said: “Even before the crash I was getting very depressed. I was just getting to the point where I thought, there has got to be more to life than making money.

“I remember one day in 2007, I had just bought a flashy new sports car. I brought it home and Danni said, ‘Wow, you must be so happy.’ And I said, ‘No, I’m not happy, actually, I am depressed.’ Back then all people cared about was money and what you could buy with it.”

Danniella added: “Right when Kevin was at his worst, I decided to confess to him some of the mistakes I had made. It was late at night and we were lying in bed. I didn’t know where it came from at the time – it just came bubbling out like Tourette’s. But now I realise it was the spirit of the Lord in me.

“I confessed to things that would have destroyed most marriages – I might share my story eventually, if the Lord wants me to. Kevin went downstairs to think. When he came back he had decided he had forgiven me and he would forgive other people who have hurt him.”

Danniella and Kevin now plan to renew their marriage vows.

I shouldn't read too much into this story, because obviously the short report is incomplete in many ways, but I can't help but notice that all of Danniella and Kevin's concerns center around themselves. There's a central selfishness to their story and to their conversion. According to Danniella:

It was an incredible experience. I have realised that there have been things I have struggled with, like guilt, that I would have never found a solution for. Because there are things that a therapist cannot give me – that I can only get from Jesus Christ.

According to Kevin:

Finding God has helped us a lot. It’s funny because while we used to talk about clothes, now we spend most of the time talking Christian talk. But it’s not like we walk around bowing to each other or trying to be these perfect people. We are still your typical married couple. We still fight.

But our faith has brought a peace and spirituality into our relationship. It has helped our kids a lot too.

I'm glad that this family is finding some peace, but what are they really doing to help themselves and others? Will giving sermons in church really change more lives for the better? Or is this just the way the religion meme works, targeting desperate people and turning them into delivery systems to spread the word? Danniella says:

I am still struggling to memorize the sermons and verses, to be honest. Being an actress, you would think I would be good at learning lines. But something is stopping me. I think the Lord wants me to feel what he is teaching, rather than just reading it.

and

People tell us, ‘Oh no, you’re in the God squad now.’ But they don’t get it. I have no interest in being famous any more unless it can help me to spread God’s word. I really think I have been put in this position to help people.

“God speaks to me in so many ways. I talk to him and it is definitely a two-way conversation.

What does it say to adopt a life stance that requires a person to focus only on one's own family and soul? Danniella claims to have spent 250,000 pounds on cocaine in her lifetime. Could that money have been better spent on almost any charity in the world that helps eliminate disease or poverty? You bet. Is this where her guilt comes from? Don't bet on it. She plans to write a book about her ordeal and parlay her small fame into being a spokesperson for God.

So of course she found one of the trendiest churches in California:

Danniella and her family now plan to be baptised in the Pacific ocean, not far from their new home in wealthy Huntington Beach. She has discussed with former EastEnders star Sid Owen the idea of him filming the ceremony as part of a reality show he will shoot about her conversion to Christianity.

The couple want to help Pastor Haizlip – who says he found God in a dark street on his way to make a drug deal – set up a church in the UK and they may do missionary work in Mexico.

They meet us in a room at the Sanctuary, where most of the members look like beach bums or reformed gang members. Huge men with shaven heads and tattoos strut around a sermon hall which is illuminated by the bright lights of a banner saying “Real”.

Pop star Katy Perry’s parents preach at the church, where the fist-thumping sermons are punctuated by skate-boarding practice and rock shows.

And of course such a church is rare in her native UK. Things like this can only be found in Bible-thumping, Jesus loving America. Danniella says:

People are so cynical about religion in the UK. Before I came to the States, I had never seen a church like this. Here, people don’t just pray – they call out to God and sing and cry.

Religion in America is all so emotive, so powerful, so fake and so unhelpful. Really doing something to help the world is hard work. It requires thinking and acting and living with your successes and failures. It requires that occasionally you put others ahead of yourself.

Is a Well-Lived Life Worth Anything? - Umair Haque - Harvard Business Review

2011-07-20T10:25:00.000-04:00

This blog post really gave me pause to think.

Is a Well-Lived Life Worth Anything? - Umair Haque - Harvard Business Review

Humanists of Rhode Island: Habitat for Humanity

2011-07-18T16:49:00.000-04:00

Humanists of Rhode Island: Habitat for Humanity

Rhode Island’s Future - DARE- Solidarity with Prisoners on Hunger Strike!

2011-07-15T17:44:00.000-04:00

Rhode Island’s Future - DARE- Solidarity with Prisoners on Hunger Strike!

Humanists of Rhode Island: The July 13th Meeting

2011-07-15T10:51:00.000-04:00

Humanists of Rhode Island: The July 13th Meeting

Rhode Island’s Future - Forum: "Civil Rights Under Attack" July 27th at Beneficent Church

2011-07-14T22:54:00.000-04:00

Rhode Island’s Future - Forum: "Civil Rights Under Attack" July 27th at Beneficent Church

Rhode Island’s Future - A Quick and Easy Guide to Biblical Marriage for When the Fundamentalists Take Over

2011-07-13T12:03:00.001-04:00

Rhode Island’s Future - A Quick and Easy Guide to Biblical Marriage for When the Fundamentalists Take Over

2011-07-13T12:03:00.000-04:00

Rhode Island’s Future - A Quick and Easy Guide to Biblical Marriage for When the Fundamentalists Take Over

The Kind of Church I'm Cautioning You About

2011-07-13T09:00:00.000-04:00

This sign is right near my house, and it got me thinking. There's just so much wrong with it. First off, it's not really a question looking for an answer or a question posed to engender dialog. It's meant to be rhetorical. The response sought is a knowing nodding of the heads of those who profess belief. Because they believe that if we are not under God, we are nothing.

But we haven't always been "a nation under God," have we? That part of the Pledge of Allegiance was added in 1954, sixty-two years after the pledge was written. The words were put there ostensibly to differentiate the United States from the "godless" Soviet Union, but in reality it was a response to the McCarthy Era's need to divide our own country into "Us" and "Them." Us, being the God believers, Them being those who are not American.

Before 1954 we were "One Nation, indivisible" but the insertion of two little words divided us, and made a mockery of the pledge.

The Mount Hope Community Baptist Church sign is attempting to be cute, but it actually perpetuates the myth of the United States as a Christian nation. Let's face it, the Pastor of this church believes in Biblical inerrancy, so he's not referring to just any old God like Allah or Thor. He's talking about Jesus.

Sorry Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Wiccans, Atheists, Humanists etc.

He's not talking about any old Jesus either. He's talking about the very specific Baptist Jesus.

Sorry Catholics, Congregationalists, UUs, Presbyterians, etc.

The sign insults all who walk past it, even those who attend the church, because it seeks not to unite, but to divide. It seeks not to enlighten, but to enforce one opinion. It does so through insult and innuendo rather than through honest communication.

It's suppose to be cute, but unfortunately it's just comes off as ignorant.

Rhode Island’s Future - Voter Fraud: Where's the Science?

2011-07-11T10:33:00.000-04:00

Rhode Island’s Future - Voter Fraud: Where's the Science?

Humanists of Rhode Island: Project Outreach at Washington Park

2011-07-05T17:18:00.000-04:00

Humanists of Rhode Island: Project Outreach at Washington Park

Humanists of Rhode Island: The Civil Union Bill, The Corvese Amendment, and Why Humanists of Rhode Island Opposes this Bill

2011-07-03T00:14:00.000-04:00

Humanists of Rhode Island: The Civil Union Bill, The Corvese Amendment, and Why Humanists of Rhode Island Opposes this Bill

Rhode Island’s Future - Chafee signs Civil Unions into law...on the Saturday of July 4 weekend.

2011-07-02T15:06:00.000-04:00

I am outraged. My comments after the story.

Rhode Island’s Future - Chafee signs Civil Unions into law...on the Saturday of July 4 weekend.

Rhode Island’s Future - Dissecting the Bishop's Claims on Civil Unions

2011-07-01T09:07:00.000-04:00

A piece I wrote on Bishop Tobin and Civil Unions this morning at RI Future:

Rhode Island’s Future - Dissecting the Bishop's Claims on Civil Unions

Apathy

2011-06-17T09:26:00.000-04:00

I've been talking lately about work, especially the kind of work many of America's working poor are engaged in. I've presented my ideas by presenting "big business" and "corporations" as the bad guys, tirelessly working to steal time from the lives of their employees for as little pay as possible. I've suggested that the employees only rational, economically thoughtful response is to work as little as possible at these jobs, reversing the company's idea of "more work/less pay" into "more pay/less work."

To many reading these essays, such a suggestion smacks of apathy, "a state of indifference, or the suppression of emotions such as concern, excitement, motivation and passion" to quote Wikipedia. Apathy is not usually associated with good mental health. The idea that we should consciously disengage emotionally from our jobs, which many of us endure for over forty hours a week (or almost half our waking lives, depending on travel time to and from work) seems to be courting a negative psychological state. This is dangerous.

I have two points to make about this.

1. Apathy was first clinically identified in soldiers suffering what used to be called "shell-shock" but what we now call post-traumatic stress disorder. The fact that we can see so much apparent apathy in America's low paid work force is possibly attributable to the mind-numbing and soul crushing nature of their jobs. The context of their situations may be less dramatic than a battlefield in war, but years of living in hopeless working poverty have the same general effect. The biggest difference is that the working poor have little to no health care, and little hope of their war ever ending.

2. What I am suggesting when I present the economic theory that workers should work less is not the adoption of apathy as an emotional response. I'm talking about actively engaging with the machinery that pays us nothing to work as virtual slaves so as to free ourselves. Every act of rebellion is a small victory, and should be celebrated as such. Every phone call made on company time, every conversation with a co-worker about football or American Idol is a re-affirmation of our humanity. We should be striving for more human time and less company time.

I am not calling for more apathy, I'm looking for a way to avoid apathy. We are a nation of free humans, with the power to shape our society any way we wish. But the first step to doing so is to acknowledge ourselves as worthy beings, and to fight back against those who would oppress us.

Fighting against corporations that see you as nothing more valuable than an easily replaceable money making tool is not easy. These companies have developed very sophisticated techniques for both extracting more work from you and for monitoring your performance. I'll talk about this next.

A response to "On the Job Laziness is Patriotic" and "Work Ethic Scam"

2011-06-16T09:00:00.001-04:00

After I wrote my piece on "lazy" workers in shit jobs, this was posted on FaceBook by Christopher Tremain:

If business wants workers to work harder, then business is cordially invited to fuck off. The amount of production per worker has exploded in the last few decades, while real wages have stagnated and in some cases decreased. Business has nothing to complain about, but workers have a very big and legitimate gripe.

No kidding. The idea that the new generation is lazy or incompetent is wrong. They simply have woken up to the basic fact that the game is rigged, and that they're going to lose.

After my essay on the so-called "Work Ethic," Tangerine chimed in with:

This is sort of the same argument unschoolers make for being anti-school. Kids will work hard and learn about what is important to them. When people try to control what they learn, they become apathetic. The shaping of the American work ethic begins in the nursery. Sit, stay, do what you're told, don't ask too many questions.

Under this formulation, instead of educating children, our schools are simply programming them to be parts of a money making machine for corporations and businesses. Strangely, there is an active process on the part of the Republican Party to defund schools, to destroy what little value they have, and to virtually mandate the idea of teaching kids to take tests, rather than to focus on actual education that may expand their minds.

Work Ethic Scam

2011-06-15T12:11:00.000-04:00

Dogs make excellent pets for humans, but long ago, before domestication, dogs were wild, and had little use for hairless monkeys like us. Humans began the process of domestication because dogs were useful for hunting, protection, herding and a multitude of other tasks. Humans did not domesticate lions, or deer, or bears, because these species lacked qualities that would allow domestication. They domesticated dogs, because dogs are pack animals with primitive group identities. Smart humans were able to trick the dog's instinct to be pack animals with dominant leaders, and that process continues today.

On another level there is the cow. Though domesticated, the cow is never really made to be a part of a family, the way dogs are. Cows are useful for meat and milk. In order to get a cow to give milk, it is necessary to trick the cow's unconscious biological instincts. The cow is impregnated, gives birth, and the calf is taken away. The cow then gives milk, which the humans use to feed themselves.

I contend that the so-called work ethic works the same way. Our culture disdains laziness, because in the past, lazy people produced less, which put everyone in a tribe at risk of starvation or worse. So we as a species value hard work for good reasons. Working hard is a virtue, even today, and I won't say anything against that. We should all work hard to better ourselves, our family, and our society.

The problem is that businesses and corporations have found ways to use this ingrained sense of hard work against us. After negotiating painfully low wages for all sorts of demeaning work, these companies insist we work as hard as possible at the jobs they give us. Failure to live up to impossible or back breaking expectations will be chalked up to laziness, or to a lack of a decent work ethic.

Ridiculous. People work hard at the things that are important to them. That kid at the Walmart who's ignoring you while he's chatting up a cute cashier is working very hard. He's just not working the way Walmart, or you, want him to. He's working on his social life and social skills. Remember, Walmart is paying him crap wages, and the company would not only pay him less if they could, they actively lobby Congress for the right to pay him less. They are working all the time, paying millions of dollars to lobbyists, to pay that kid less and less.

There is nothing wrong with that kid or his work ethic. True, there are people out there who are simply lazy scam artists, and it's unlikely that the kid ignoring his job duties to flirt with a co-worker has thought through the ideas I've been presenting in these essays, but the kid knows he's getting a shit deal at the hands of the company he works for and the country that allows the company to operate the way it does.

So he fights back, consciously or unconsciously, with the only weapon at his disposal: apathy.

So here's another basic truth:

The work ethic is a scam to victimize the working poor.

If you're interested in reading some rather long, but interesting pieces on the work ethic, check these out:

Steven Malanga comes at the idea from a conservative, perhaps even Libertarian POV in "Whatever Happened to the Work Ethic." I disagree with nearly everything he says.

Andre Gorz approaches the death of the work ethic from a Marxist POV in "Critique of Economic Reason: Summary for Trade Unionists and Other Left Activists." Though I agree with much of what Gorz says, I think in many ways he makes the same mistakes as Malanga.

On the Job Laziness is Patriotic

2011-06-14T14:46:00.000-04:00

It's pretty easy to shop in a Walmart or a McDonald's and complain about the disinterested, less-than-stellar service you might receive from one of the employees. Often the employee might even go so far as to ignore you, avoid you, or at best simply extend the minimum amount of effort towards satisfying your needs. We look at this employee and think about the lack of work ethic, or the lack of professionalism, or pride, or care, or even basic human politeness. We blame the employee, but they are doing exactly the right thing when giving you terrible service. In fact, I would argue that they are being downright patriotic in not giving a crap about the customers.

Free market economics dictate that people must negotiate with other people over the value of their goods and services. This doesn't just extend to driving around, looking for the lowest prices on gasoline. When a person enters the labor market, they are selling a valuable commodity, themselves, and it behooves that person to get the most money they can for the time they are giving up to work. Who in their right mind would turn down a perfectly legal job that paid them $1000 a week for fifteen minutes of easy work? On the other hand, who would do hard labor in a mine for $1 a month? We search for the best possible money for the least worst job.

On the other side, businesses and corporations are always looking to pay their workers as little as possible. The minimum wage in Georgia is $5.15 an hour, and you can bet that Walmart staffs its stores with plenty of people earning that rate. Meanwhile, in San Francisco, the minimum wage is $9.92, so that's what they pay there. Big corporations will always pay as little as possible, even when they are paying for baseball players or movie stars. We all gasp when we see some movie star getting paid ten million to be in some movie, but when we think about the movie producing revenue of nine hundred million dollars, we suddenly get a very different view of the actor's value. Ten million dollars is cheap.

Since it behooves a company to pay you as little as possible, but they still need a great amount of work to be done, the company sets middle management with the task of getting the workers to do as much work as possible for as little money as possible. In a store of two to three hundred employees, perhaps five of them are managers who are given incentives, usually in the form of cash bonuses, to keep labor costs down and productivity up. Bonuses kick in when certain plateaus are reached, but the plateaus are always referred to by those in the know as "stretch goals" and are almost always unreachable. (One company I worked for didn't even bother with cash incentives, or establish goals. They simply had contests that would give the management team free $99 iPods if they showed the most improvement company wide, out of some 1300 stores. Every store works like crazy to improve profits, for the total cost of $500. Brilliant, if the employees are stupid enough to actually work to win these contests.)

Given this push by companies to pay less and less but to demand more and more, an employee's only recourse is to demand more and more pay, and work less and less. This is the logical corollary to the corporate position, and one, frankly, I'm surprised we don't hear more about.

In the example where you're working at WalMart for $5.15 an hour, what you should be doing is as little work as possible. After all, workers give up the most valuable thing they own, hours of their lives in which they could be hanging out with friends, reading books, having sex, watching television, or creating art. Instead they are forced to dress up in stupid uniforms stocking shelves inside a concrete box. If an employee decides to do as little work as possible, that is, texting friends on their cellphones, talking and flirting with fellow employees, or hanging out in back of the store smoking, they are actually engaging in true free market negotiations.

The corporation could fire these employees if caught, so the employee would be smart to perform these actions outside the view of management. They should do the minimum amount of work it takes to fool the management into thinking that they are decent employees, but actually working hard would be foolish. They are not paid to work hard if they are not paid a decent wage.

I've got more to say on this, but right now let me leave you with this very simple and indisputable piece of economic wisdom:

Just as it is in a company's best interest to pay an employee as little as possible to do as much work as possible, so is it in the employee's best interest to do as little work as possible for as much pay as possible.

Freak Out Over “Genderless” Baby Reveals Deeper Anti-LGBT Animosity

2011-06-08T08:55:00.000-04:00

As an author, Mitch Albom is nothing more than a purveyor of feel good crap. That his stuff resonates with anyone is an indication as to how low the public's expectations are when it comes to modern literature. Amazingly, some of his stuff makes it on to high School reading lists, even though it's all just right wing conservative Christian dross encoded as to be acceptable to the mainstream.

Albom decided to take issue with a Canadian couple's choice to keep private the details of their child's gender until such a time as the child can decide for his or herself what her sexual identity to be. This has unaccountably angered Albom, as well as many right wing conservative Christian groups, but Albom has gone ahead and compared the parents decision to allowing the child to wallow in feces or to wield a chainsaw.

I'm not kidding. That's how stupid Mitch Albom is.

Read on:

Freak Out Over “Genderless” Baby Reveals Deeper Anti-LGBT Animosity

Zen

2011-06-07T00:14:00.001-04:00

To the extent that I study meditative Zen techniques, I am a follower of Buddhism, but despite this experimentation I am still very hard minded when it comes to supernatural or mystical explanations for various things. Tonight at Zen is an excellent case in point. An invited guest speaker and Zen Master was giving a talk, and at one point mentioned the an unusual sense of dread she had experienced during the tragic events of 9/11, and other times of tragedy. (I have omitted some specifics because I don't wish to embarrass or provoke anyone at my Zen group. The details are mostly unimportant to my point.)

The teacher suggested that everyone has experienced a sense of dread at some point that has been found out to be justified. She indicated that this was some sort of sense we have, unrelated to the usual five I suppose. I was reminded of Obi Wan Kenobi doubling over when Alderaan was destroyed. He knew without being told that millions of people had died, because he was a Jedi Master.

I know, because of my reading into cognitive science, that the brain doesn't work that way. We don't have psychic powers, we can't use the Force, and Zen isn't magic. Humans are really good at confirmation bias. We remember our lucky guesses and forget all the times we guessed wrong. We are also really good at gauging the moods of those around us, and acting accordingly. If we see people behaving unusually, our guard goes up and we analyze the situation until we learn what's going on. Finally, we are really bad at remembering what thought processes led us to certain conclusions.

In the example of 9/11, the Zen Master indicated that though it was a beautiful day, she just felt that something really bad was going to happen, and sure enough, it did. But really, once something bad happens, we immediately search ourselves for any thing we might have missed that could have prevented the tragedy. It doesn't matter if there was nothing you could have done, we seek to learn not only from our mistakes, but from the mistakes of others.

What I'm trying to say is that our brains are complex and imperfect, as are the information gathering senses we possess. There is no need to seek out new abilities to explain ourselves, until we have completely deciphered the mysteries of how the brain works.

As for Zen, I will continue to sit, continue to practice and continue to learn with an open mind, but I will not profess belief in any kind of supernaturalism

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Christians take on Ayn Rand

2011-05-31T10:03:00.000-04:00

Christianity and Objectivism are more alike than dissimilar, so it's interesting that The American Values Network is suddenly raising the issue of Ayn Rand's atheism. This is put out by a liberal Christian group trying to bring some compassion back to Christianity. Good luck with that, and I mean it.

After the rapture

2011-05-27T10:20:00.002-04:00

High School Atheists on the Radio Tonight!

2011-05-25T18:19:00.000-04:00

Got this from Dan DaRocha, host of Freethought Rhode Island:

Jessica Ahlquist, Damon Howler and Harrison Hopkins will be live on tonight's episode of Freethought Rhode Island. We broadcast live tonight at 9PM on 88.1FM and stream live www.welh.net

Email your questions dan@riatheist.com and I'll read them on the air.

--
Daniel DaRocha
Rhode Island Atheist Society

www.RIATHEIST.com

Jewish Secularism

2011-05-22T09:00:00.000-04:00

I was raised Catholic, so there's a lot I don't know about the specifics of Jewish Secularism. This article, by Steve Lipman, from The New York Jewish Week provides an interesting overview of where scholarship and trends in that area has been going. Of special note is the involvement of Phil Zuckerman, who heads the new department of secular studies at Pitzer College.

Nearly 50 years ago, Time magazine, in a report about Jewish opposition to “religious practices” in public schools, described a rise in Jewish secularism that disturbed some leaders of the American Jewish community.

Jewish support for a secular agenda added “fuel to the flames of anti-Semitism,” Time quoted Rabbi Immanuel Jakobovits of Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue Synagogue as warning. “The danger” to American Jewry, said Michael Wyschogrod, assistant professor of philosophy at Hunter College, is not the threat of conversion to Christianity, but “secularism, the disappearance of the word ‘God’ from the minds and tongues of millions of Jews.”

In 2011, the emerging strength of Jewish secularism (or secular Jews, not necessarily the same) that Time wrote about has grown into a presence that represents about four in 10 of the country’s self-identified Jews, according to studies, and which is subject to less criticism from Jewish and outside circles.

Keep reading...

The Great Snatch

2011-05-21T09:00:00.019-04:00

Today is perhaps the last day on Earth for the CIGS (Christians In Good Standing) and the beginning of the end for the rest of us, I thought it might be useful to see what, exactly, to expect today, because today is:

First off, contrary to popular opinion, God is taking everyone into heaven fully clothed, not leaving the clothing behind as some people think. You think God wants a heaven full of naked, embarrassed Christians? Have you ever seen a Tea Party rally? You don't want to even imagine those people naked. The rest of this really bothers me, though:

The world's going to be blown to bits? What the hell are the meek going to end up inheriting? And what about that alternate term for the Rapture in that last panel? The blond girl looks hypnotized. Perhaps she stared too long into the Great Snatch?

I did a Google search for the Great Snatch. Don't do this.

Everyone Draw Muhammad Day 2011

2011-05-20T09:00:00.001-04:00

This crap is really just all made up, isn't it?

2011-05-19T09:00:00.001-04:00

Is it true that without God, anything goes?

2011-05-18T14:16:00.000-04:00

Luke Muehlhauser

Luke Muehlhauser is one of my favorite contemporary philosophers, and as far as I know, he has no academic credentials, he's an autodidact, completely self taught. Here he puts to a lie the idea that without the moral absolutism of God, people will descend into violent, uncaring nihilism. After giving up his belief in God and Jesus, Luke writes on Less Wrong:

I was not okay with the truth. I had been taught that meaning and morality and hope depended on God. If God didn't exist, then life was meaningless.

My tongue felt like cardboard for a week.

But when I pulled my head out of the sand, I noticed that millions of people were living lives of incredible meaning and morality and hope without gods. The only thing I had 'lost' was a lie, anyway. It all added up to normality after all.

This crisis taught me a lesson: that I could be okay with the truth.

When I realized that I am not an Unmoved Mover of my own actions, I was not much disturbed. I realized that 'moral responsibility' still mattered, because people still had reasons to condemn, praise, punish, and reward certain actions in others. And I realized that I could still deliberate about which actions were likely to achieve my goals, and that this deliberation would affect my actions. Apples didn't stop falling from trees when Einstein's equations replaced Newton's, and humans didn't stop making conscious choices that have consequences when we discovered that we are fully part of nature.

I didn't freak out when I gave up moral absolutism, either. I had learned to be okay with the truth. In the end, it all adds up to normality. Whatever is meant by 'morality', it remains the case that agents have reasons to praise and condemn certain desires and actions in other agents, and that there are more reasons to praise and condemn some actions than others.

I've gone through massive reversals in my metaethics twice now, and guess what? At no time did I spontaneously acquire the urge to rape people. At no time did I stop caring about the impoverished. At no time did I want to steal from the elderly. At no time did people stop having reasons to praise or condemn certain desires and actions of mine, and at no time did I stop having reasons to praise or condemn the desires and actions of others.

We humans have a tendency to 'freak out' when our model of the world changes drastically. But we get over it.

The love a mother has for her child does not disappear when we explain the brain processes that instantiate that love. Explaining something is not explaining it away. Showing that love and happiness and moral properties are made of atoms does not mean they are just atoms. They are also love and happiness and moral properties. Water was still water after we discovered which particular atoms it was made of.

When you understand this, you need not feel the threat of nihilism as science marches on. Instead, you can jump with excitement as science locates everything we care about in the natural world and tells us how it works. Along the way, you can take joy in the merely real.

Whenever you 'lose' something as a result of getting closer to the truth, you've only lost a lie. You can face reality, even the truth about morality.

In addition to his top notch philosophy blog, Common Sense Atheism, I can recommend his PodCast, Conversations from the Pale Blue Dot and his contributions to Less Wrong, from which the above passage was taken.

Newt Gingrich off to a great start...

2011-05-17T12:00:00.000-04:00

Christopher Hitchens can defend himself, but...

2011-05-17T11:21:00.000-04:00

Deepok Chopra becomes more and more annoying every day. Does anything he says actually make sense? Not only does he resort to inane comparisons and faulty logic, he also intentionally distorts facts, rendering him absolutely worthless in an reasonable debate about matters of religion, morality, or truth.

In a recent piece for the San Francisco Chronicle, Chopra takes on Christopher Hitchen's letter to the American Atheists. He takes issue specifically with Hitchen's materialism:

Since we live in a scientific age, I imagine that stout atheists are driven more than anything by impatience to finish the job. When science is poised to solve every remaining mystery and technology unfolds every new convenience, why should we keep any allegiance to an outworn world view?

Religion would be "an outworn world view" even if science and technology did not provide real hope for a better world in the future. Religion gives no hope, only the illusion thereof. A false hope may be a kind of hope (in the same sense that "no food" is a kind of food, I suppose) but it is still, above all, false. The above quoted passage also displays Chopra's atheist-materialist straw man in all its dross: No atheist believes that science is poised to solve all the world's problems, they have just learned that science provides a real possibility to answer some questions and solve some problems of importance, unlike religion, which increasing limits itself to solving problems (like homosexuality) that aren't actually problems at all.

Chopra continues:

By making belief in God their enemy, atheists deprive themselves of what spirituality is really about: a process of inner growth. There are wisdom traditions around the world that do not use the word God (e.g., Buddhism, Vedanta) or advocate religious worship in the conventional sense.

This is simply a lie. Atheists do not deprive themselves of inner growth. Atheists seek to ground their morality in reality, seek their growth in the areas of truth, and understand "spirituality" if they deign to use the word that in its very root (spirit) suggests a dualistic world view, as something more akin to awe. Many Buddhists identify as atheist, placing them squarely in the materialist camp, which is a step beyond not using "the word God."

But perhaps Chopra's greatest lie, is this line:

By discounting the whole notion of spiritual awakening, atheists make a claim to false knowledge. They haven't walked the walk, yet somehow they know, with dead certainty, that Buddha, Socrates, Plato, Jesus, Confucius, Zoroaster, Saint Paul, Rumi, Kabir, the Prophet Muhammad, Rabindranath Tagore, and countless others aren't just wrong; they are stupid and blinkered compared to any everyday atheist today.

This list conflates the very different kinds of "spirituality" these men supposedly possessed. Plato was a dualist because that's where reason took him. Buddha rejected the spiritual notions of his time, especially reincarnation and gods, in favor of a real world sense of being in the moment. Jesus may well be completely mythical, or at the very least the product of stories told and expanded, much as Socrates was made larger than life in the works of Plato. Confucius wrote in his Analects about our duty to this world. His work is secular, not spiritual in nature, and takes no position on God or spirituality. Paul was a homophobic misogynist, so his sudden spiritual awakening did him a fat lot of good. Muhammad founded the religion Islam, which in its most extreme form uses children as bombs, and in its most liberal form maintains that we are all, literally, slaves to God.

My point hopefully made I hope it is now obvious that no two people on Chopra's list are remotely similar. To somehow lump them together is the same as going to a mental hospital and declaring all the patients, with their various manias, depressions, pathologies, brain injuries and dependencies as simply "nuts" rather than to arrive at a formal diagnosis for each. This is lazy, and Chopra is simply making a woo-woo and inaccurate analogy, trying to rope as many believers as possible into his brand of spirituality as an alternative form of truth.

Chopra concludes, in a haze of confusion, as he twists the word "truth" to mean several different things at once:

The atheist's mistake is to hog the moral limelight, declaring that only non-believers own the truth. The truth is a process of discovery, and anyone who blocks the process and denies its validity needs to wake up before denouncing anyone else as stupid or blind.

Note what Chopra does there. First he says that atheists claim to have the truth. In this sense of the word truth, as to whether or not there is a god, atheists have concluded there is not, or at least they see no proof for the existence of such a being. Then Chopra pulls a switch, and suddenly "truth is a process of discovery." Like a stage magician loaded with smoke bombs, Chopra reveals that the subject isn't God's existence or the truth of different religious world views, it's about ways of knowing the world through a process of discovery, which somehow atheists are denying and blocking access to.

What a crock of shit, Chopra should do better than to cloud his fuzzy rhetoric in lies so facile. Of course, to defend his broken and preposterous world view, Chopra has no other recourse. As a spiritual writer he lives comfortably atop his house of canards, and the edifice is beginning to fall.

John Boehner, a Catholic, fails his Faith

2011-05-15T09:23:00.000-04:00

One thing the Catholic Church has going for it is a fairly decent record of lobbying not only against human rights issues such as gay marriage and reproductive freedoms but for human rights issues such as alleviating poverty and immigration. So a recent letter written by several prominent Catholic leaders that called John Boehner's record in Congress one of the worst in regards to caring about the poor goes a (very) little way towards mitigating the worst Catholic excesses.

For the Catholic Church to chastise John Boehner on issues of morality is a little like a shark extolling the virtues of veganism to a tiger. Predators are predators, after all.

We shouldn't read too much into this.

John Boehner Draws Catholic Criticism for Record on Programs for Poor - ABC News

Bring on the Middle Ages?

2011-05-14T07:19:00.000-04:00

The DesMoines Register has a funny little letter from a person named Chris Moon:

In his defense of atheism, Russell Bird ("We're Still Trapped in Medieval Dogma," May 5 letter) declaims Communist regimes, which is legitimate, but in so doing, he either misses or avoids the obvious when he further states atheism's goal is to "maintain separation of church and state."

The regimes he denied achieved complete separation of church from state, and then killed enough people to depopulate half the United States.

Given history, it seems that when atheists attain their stated aim to keep us from going down the "same old rabbit hole," we may be praying for the chance to go there again soon after, needing a hole to hide in from their age of enlightenment, like the one they had in France.

Alternatives considered, bring on the Middle Ages.

So rather than maintain our Constitutional mandate to keep church and state separate, Chris Moon would rather bring on the theocracy of the middle ages? Does he (or she) really think that the only alternative to the ignorance and superstition and holy wars of this barbarous period is Stalinistic and Maoist regimes?

Chris Moon needs to wake up and smell the shit he's slinging.

The Missing Piece? Secularism.

2011-05-12T09:00:00.001-04:00

Fadi Hakura, writing for the Christian Science Monitor wonders about the prospects of real democracy in the Middle East. One part stood out to me:

History teaches us that free and fair elections alone will not cure the steep divisions in Arab societies. Indeed, they will probably exacerbate them. Shorn of feelings of national solidarity, narrow sectional interests may dictate voting patterns. A crucial piece of the puzzle is missing. Without it, the Arab countries will have the edifice of democracy but not genuine representative institutions.

That crucial (missing) piece is secularism, a principle that girds most vibrant democracies; the belief that the state should exist separately from religion or religious beliefs. Governments should not privilege one religion over another nor derive policy from a particular religious source. They should be equidistant from all religions, effectively blind to someone's religious persuasion.

Secularism is a misunderstood concept in much of the Middle East, a legacy of the cold war. Arabs confuse secularism with atheism, understanding it to mean freedom from religion rather than freedom of religion. More damaging is secularism’s association with the past regimes in Egypt and Tunisia, both known for their containment of Islamist movements. However, those very regimes mobilized religious fervor through state propaganda and lavish budgets to maintain favor with electorates.

The Need to Marginalize Christian Reconstructionism

2011-05-11T10:26:00.000-04:00

Bobby Franklin

Christian Reconstructionism, according to Wikipedia, "is a religious and theological movement within Protestant Christianity that calls for Christians to put their faith into action in all areas of life, within the private sphere of life and the public sphere as well." This dry formulation barely scratches the surface of this odious belief system. Take every terrible thing you know about Christianity and the Bible, crank it up to maximum awfulness, and you'll begin to understand.

Worse, the Reconstructionists feel no obligation to tell the truth about their beliefs. Though some with these beliefs campaign openly if they come from districts that are sympathetic, most hide the extent of their beliefs behind a veneer of "normal" Christianity. In “The intellectual Schizophrenia of the New Christian Right” Reconstructionist Gary Kilgore North said:

So let us be blunt about it: We must use the doctrine of religious liberty to gain independence for Christian schools until we train up a generation of people who know that there is no religious neutrality, no neutral law, no neutral education, and no neutral civil government. Then they will be get busy in constructing a Bible-based social, political and religious order which finally denies the religious liberty of the enemies of God.

This is the reason conservatives like Scott Walker are so hellbent on destroying teacher unions and public education. They want public schools to be a thing of the past. Education is the concern of the family and church. The plan is to use the freedoms of the United States to ultimately take control of the system and then take away the freedoms of everyone, instituting a theocracy. (Though the Reconstructionists would quibble over the term and call it a theonomy.)

So it should surprise no one when Georgia Republican State Representative Bobby Franklin accused some of his constituents of idolatry when he FaceBooked, "Bobby Franklin is saddened as I watch my fellow Georgians pray to their god, FEMA, to save them." This is the unbelievable dirtbag who once said, "America is at war with women who have abortions. No, I'm not kidding."

That Franklin is capable of this massive betrayal of human compassion and decency should stun no one. Despite the 2 to 5 billion dollars in damage and the deaths of over 340 people due to tornagoes and flooding in Georgia, Franklin will feel nothing but the smug satisfaction that God's will has been done. His Christianity has rendered him inhuman, as religion is wont to do.

How wacky is Bobby Franklin? Take a look at Wikipedia:

According to the Atlanta Journal Constitution, Rep. Franklin has proposed ending driver’s licenses in Georgia.

On Libertarian/Christian grounds.

Franklin sponsored a bill that require all state transactions, including the payment of taxes to the state, take place in either Gold or Silver.

Because this will be so easy to do.

Rep. Franklin caused controversy when he proposed Georgia House Bill One. Opponents claimed it would “require proof that a miscarriage occured naturally.” If proof could not be provided, the mother could face “felony charges”. Franklin rebutted saying the claims had "no merit." Independent fact-checking source Politifact rated the opponents claims "Mostly True."

Rep. Franklin caused some controversy when he called actions made by the United States and Allied Forces in Libya "pure evil." He compared the acts of Muammar Gaddafi against his own people to American Doctors providing abortions.

He hates reproductive and homosexual rights. And ultimately he believes that the institution of slavery will be reintroduced to America. As the father of modern Christian Reconstrutionism, RJ Rushdooney, has said:

The law here is human and also unsentimental. It recognizes that some people are by nature slaves and will always be so. It both requires that they be dealt with in a godly manner and also that the slave recognize his position and accept it with grace.

Under Biblical Law, "Fathers could sell their daughters into slavery. Female slaves would retain that status for life. Slave owners would be allowed to physically abuse them, as long as the slaves lived for at least a day before dying of the beating.

Bobby Franklin is a product of his twisted and inhuman beliefs. He will never change, and, let's face it, the minimal amount of political power he possesses is way too much. He and his ilk need to be marginalized and denied power until they are ultimately forgotten by history.

New Single-Payer Health care Bill introduced by the great Bernie Sanders

2011-05-10T17:06:00.001-04:00

Fighting Bank Fraud with New Bottom Line.com

2011-05-10T11:28:00.000-04:00

Speaking of Bill Boards

2011-05-10T10:29:00.000-04:00

Meanwhile, atheist and humanist billboards don't fare so well:

Judgment Day, May 21, 2011

2011-05-10T10:23:00.000-04:00

I saw this at the train station in Attleboro, Massachusetts. How much does this inane campaign cost? What a waste of time, money and effort. See you on May 22nd!

Is Pam Geller trying to be the worst person in America?

2011-05-10T09:00:00.061-04:00

Pam Geller writes a blog called Atlas Shrugs, which seems to purposefully conflate the meaning of objectivist and objectionable. There's a list of her written vomit on Wikipedia:

Controversial postings on Atlas Shrugs have included a number of false claims, including that Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan (who is Jewish) supports Nazi ideology (accompanied by a fake picture of her in a Nazi uniform), a video suggesting that Muslims have sex with goats, a doctored photo showing President Obama urinating on an American flag and false claims that Obama's mother was involved in pornography and that Obama "was involved with a crack whore in his youth". Geller has also posted accusations against President Obama of anti-Semitism and doing the bidding of "Islamic overlords," while her site posted a posting by another writer who, inter alia, suggested without any evidence that the President is the "love child" of Malcolm X (Geller herself says she does not believe that Obama is Malcolm X's love child, and never did). During an RT Television News interview, reporter Lauren Lister repeatedly questioned Geller's claim that she is not anti-Muslim, at one point calling attention to Geller's having posted a drawing of Muhammad on her blog with the face of a pig superimposed over his own. Geller responded by saying "I don't know where it is in America that you can't make jokes or make fun." In the same video, Geller also incorrectly stated that the last chapter of the Qu'ran encouraged Muslims to attack nonbelievers. Geller has written "that Islam is the most antisemitic, genocidal ideology in the world".

Now that the birther conspiracy is finally closed, Geller's moved on to the next round of obscene harassment of our President. She's somehow decided that the marriage of Obama's parents was illegitimate, and that bastards are ineligible to be president:

It is interesting to note that BHO I (Geller's term for Obama's father) claims in the documents to have divorced first wife, Kezia, "verbally." According to the Shariah, a man can divorce his wife by repeating it three times. Further, when BHO I returned to Kenya, he apparently lived with his first Kenyan wife and his American third wife, suggesting that the "divorce" he ostensibly secured to marry Dunham was a transitory ruse.

That would make the president illegitimate. In 1787, illegitimate children had different rights. There is no way the founders of this great nation intended for an illegitimate child of a foreign bigamist to attain the highest, most powerful position in the new land.

Poor Geller is so bogged down by her racism, conspiracy theory and insanity that she can no longer be trusted to say anything the least bit rational.

Some political theories have as much hold, power and irrationality as any religion. Years ago, Geller came under the spell of Ayn Rand's ridiculous Objectivist theories and lost herself forever. She'll rant and rave and perhaps convince the readers of drivel like the World Net daily that she has some special insight, but her views are as fanciful and useless as any theological arguments about angels, dancing, and pinheads.

The Failure of Gay Marriage in Rhode Island

2011-05-09T09:00:00.100-04:00

A while back I made a film in which i interviewed Christopher Plante, of NOM RI, the group that, along with the Archdiocese of Providence under the leadership of Bishop Tobin, shares the bulk of responsibility for defeating the same-sex marriage bill in the Rhode Island House this legislative session. I've placed the film at the end of this post, along with a much longer version, which is the complete interview.

The film opens with the following words:

In 2010, with the election of Lincoln Chafee to the position of Governor of Rhode Island, the way seemed clear for the passage of a same-sex marriage bill, which the previous governor had promised to veto.

In response, NOM, the National Organization for Marriage, a group opposed to same-sex marriage, redoubled their efforts...

and ends with the following analysis:

Due to the efforts of NOM RI, under the leadership of Chris Plante and the grassroots coalition he has formed with religious groups such as the Catholic Church, the passing of a same-sex marriage bill in Rhode Island is in serious doubt.

I have to admit, I faced some criticism for interviewing Plante, because he is a out and out homophobic bigot. There is a sense out there that I needed to be harder on him, and more confrontational, but I was more interested in letting him talk, so as to get at the root of his views and beliefs. Watching either film below would be a shock to the average person. Chris Plante is as slick an operator as they come, with ready made arguments for any question I tossed at him, but his central ideas, enshrouded as they are in a blather of incoherent religiosity given the patina of faux rationality, are bankrupt.

MERI, (Marriage Equality Rhode Island) the group at the forefront of the battle for same-sex marriage rights, was outclassed and outmaneuvered by a guy with all the scruples and morality as the smarmiest imaginable door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman.The Providence Phoenix did a great job of making sense of the reasons MERI lost and NOM RI won. In "The stunning demise of gay marriage" David Scharfenberg writes:

Much of the critique has focused on Kathy Kushnir, the former executive director [of MERI], who resigned last week.

Some insiders maintain she was in an impossible position — destined to be blamed, no matter what she did, for MERI's frustrated progress. But there was broad concern that Kushnir, who did not respond to a call for comment, lacked the campaign experience required for the final legislative push.

Among [Bill Fischer, MERI's former spokesman]'s biggest critiques of MERI: a hesitance to engage, directly, with Bishop Thomas J. Tobin and the Roman Catholic Diocese of Providence, which joined with the National Organization for Marriage-Rhode Island (NOM-RI), the local chapter of the leading anti-gay nuptials group in the country, to mount an aggressive lobbying effort from the start of the legislative session.

Tobin penned editorials and made direct contact with several legislators. The Reverend Bernard Healey, the church's chief lobbyist, was relentless. And NOM-RI launched a $100,000 television campaign and delivered an early barrage of phone calls and postcards that proved difficult to overcome.

"We let NOM get the jump on us in a way that's tragic, because we know public opinion is on our side," says Segal, the former state representative, who has advised MERI on its lobbying effort.

When I originally conceived the idea for NOM-inated, I thought it would be interesting to interview both Plante and Kushnir, and set up their views in opposition to one another. Repeated calls to Kushnir went unanswered. The best she would do for me was set me up with some Rhode Island College students, both excellent interviewees, but it was impossible to cut their interviews into the Plante piece because they were student activists, and Plante was a full-time lobbyist for the cause. The only person who commanded equal and opposite gravitas was the head of MERI, Kathy Kushnir, and she refused to be interviewed.

Too bad to, because NOM-inated has gone national, posted on and reposted on many blogs, and has over 1700 viewings. Her voice would have been a welcome counterweight, but the film serves the purpose it set out to fill: Christopher Plante hangs himself with his own words.

In the weeks to come I will be anxious to see what becomes of MERI. The new leader, Ray Sullivan, has been given kudos for turning the organization around, but it is too late for the present legislative session. Gordon Fox, the head of the House, has put Civil Unions on the table, a compromise that satisfies no one. The GBLT community knows it establishes their relationships as "separate but equal" and Bishop Tobin has already said he opposes them as well. Chris Plante and NOM also oppose Civil Unions.

There is no secular reason to oppose same-sex marriage. The only reason to do so is because of antiquated and cruel religious views. It is bigotry, pure and simple, that motivates the opponents, despite their cries to the contrary.

MERI, GLAD, and every other group and individual committed to same-sex marriage needs to refocus their efforts, and not give up the fight. Two local groups I belong to, the Rhode Island Atheist Society and Humanists of Rhode Island are both committed to this cause as well. In the months and perhaps even years ahead, we will continue to oppose NOM, the Catholic Church, and every other person who cannot see that a country that denies rights to a few of us denies them to all of us.