SUPREME COURT VICTORY FOR ATHEISM

Spread the happy word! The decision by the five activist and conservative mis-judgers that a crucifix is not a special religious symbol and can, therefore, be displayed in any public place is actually in agreement with atheist thought. We agree with them in seeing the cross as an empty symbol that stands for a non-event in the history of humanity. The crucifix and the crucifixion it symbolizes means nothing. Don't we agree with that? Of course we do. The cross is an empty symbol standing for nothing. The cross is just a cultural icon like a smiley face and Uncle Sam pointing at you, like Mormon bigamists, like McDonald's arches and apple pie, like the now famous Mustang Ranch in Nevada and going postal. The cross is just an ordinary cultural symbol which has no intrinsic meaning and stands for no religious beliefs. We need to thank those justices for tearing the meaning of the crucifixion down to the nothing we know it is.

I invite you all to embellish on this beginning while asking yourself if those judicial activists are really our allies and had to come up with this very tricky decision that seems to make Christianity a semi-official state religion but which really supports the Constitutional separation of church and state or did they just outsmart themselves as so many pompous a-holes often do.

THE REPUBLICAN HATE FRONT

Republicans love to claim that we all hate Palin, but what about the hateful things Republicans like Lynn Vincent and Sarah Palin say about other Americans? Lynn Vincent, Sarah's ghost writer, is notoriously anti-gay and wants to deny them the CIVIL right of marriage even though the Constitution says nothing about gays. Only in the Bible are gays so defamed, and the Bible is not the basis of American law, the Constitution is. If these Bible Bibbers would only put the Constitution ahead of their religious books, then America could get on with being a nation of laws rather than a medieval cesspool on the verge of another Inquisition. Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

ANSWER THE CHARGE OF HATRED OF GOD

In response to the following statement "(1) God doesn't exist, and (2 they hate him" which appeared on the Columbian newspaper website from a man attacking "liberals",
I entered the following response:

Let me assure you, I don't hate god. I have absolutely no feeling whatsoever about the tremendously generalized idea about a superbeing that created this universe. I care about as much about this hypothetical superbeing as I do about Martians in space ships visiting the Earth or the idea of Santa Claus which I used to put a great deal of stock in. I was tremendously disturbed when I heard that Santa didn't exist, but I got over it.

The idea of god is a scientific hypothesis about how and why the universe appears as it does to the human consciousness. Currently, the god hypothesis has no evidence whatsoever for its validity. One proof, of course, would be to find and photograph the angels waving their swords at the entrance to the Garden of Eden to keep us humans from getting at the Tree of Eternal Life. They were put there to be seen and should still be there. I can't find anywhere in the Bible that they were relieved of duty so where are they?

Currently all the evidence available to us supports the idea that the beginning of the universe came about 15 billion years ago in a tremendous and unexplained explosion which is evidenced to our ears in TV static and to our eyes through the Hubble telescope and our being able to tell by light shift that the Cosmos is expanding at an ever increasing speed out in all directions. As far as we can measure and think, the material universe itself is as infinite and eternal as any possible spiritual entity, if and when we can ever, through our material senses, record this supposed "spiritual" realm that some have great hope in to reward them for obedience and to torture everyone else who doesn't agree with them... like me, for example. As far as I know about who hates who, my wishes for Christians aren't half so hateful as to include a place where they'll be eternal tortured for not agreeing with me.


AS TO A LOCAL PRAYER BREAKFAST (the Xtian tool for corrupting our Constitutional guaranteed secular governance),

I replied:

My wife suffered the unintended oppression of working for an organization in another city in which some members networked every day at lunch on the job with the boss to pray together. Quite naturally when people meet together on a regular basis, drawn together by a common purpose, they tend to grow closer together than those who don't share their common purpose and don't meet with them. "In" people tend to trust "in" people more than the "out" people in any organization. This is a well-documented phenomena in group dynamics. It's also the problem that all minorities of any kind deal with daily in any culture. That's why our Constitution is specially designed to protect minorities from the oppression of the majority. It's why "separation of church and state" was implemented in our Constitution. Our founding fathers knew what it meant to be oppressed by religious majorities.

To return to my wife's case. Turns out that every time an opening occurred in the management network of the place where my wife worked, people who networked together in prayer (several also attended the same church) were selected more often to fill the openings. Not only that, certain of the males who networked together in prayer, openly espoused the Christian idea that women's work was in the home. One of those men eventually came into authority over my wife, and when she was asked to do some (what seemed to her) questionable things, she respectfully disagreed with the Christian in charge and suggested other ways to handle the situation at hand. Her manager (like so many Christian males) was not able to handle being disagreed with by a woman who ought to be at home (and who did not pray as he prayed) and soon he fired her for insubordination. I should mention that all my wife's suggestions were offered within the framework of staff meetings where such matters are supposed to be offered up and discussed. This Christian male was way out of line. 

My wife is a quiet, conscientious sort of employee. It's not her usual way to create disturbances where she works. When she recently received her Masters in Public Administration and was honored at an awards ceremony for their top students, her supervising professor said, "M______, no matter what, she's always the consummate professional."

My wife could have, of course, pursued this injustice as a sex discrimination case, but, as I said, my wife's a quiet sort who doesn't seek trouble and we didn't really have the resources to embark on such a course of action. However, she was so much in the right that the president of that little incestuously Christian office, after a sweaty and nervous apology to my spouse, wrote a glowing letter of recommendation for her. It was so glowing that one wonders why she was fired? Get the idea?

My point is that no matter how unintended, when people join together in groups (prayer or otherwise), they are building networks which favor the in people and exclude the out people. It doesn't help that I know for certain that many of the people in attendance at these little pools of incipient prejudice are there only to protect their prestige and standing with others who might benefit them in business. Sad that freedom of belief is so suppressed in our culture that average businessmen must pretend to a strong belief that they don't necessarily have in order to further their business interests. Very few people in America are courageous enough to buck the prejudices of the majority Christians until after they've retired and are free to think differently than the majority. It's an age old tale.

If I found a businessman whose services or products I needed who was courageous enough to buck the Christian power elite of Vancouver, I'd do business with him/her in heartbeat. I'd know he had integrity for sure, whereas all those in attendance at these well-publicized networking opportunities for the majority Christian power structure are highly suspect in my eyes.

PLEDGES TO ABSTAIN WORTH THE AIR THEIR SPOKEN INTO

Teenagers who pledge to remain virgins until marriage are just as likely to have premarital sex as those who do not promise abstinence and are significantly less likely to use condoms and other forms of birth control when they do, according to a study released today.

The new analysis of data from a large federal survey found that more than half of youths became sexually active before marriage regardless of whether they had taken a "virginity pledge," but that the percentage who took precautions against pregnancy or sexually transmitted diseases was 10 points lower for pledgers than for non-pledgers.

"Taking a pledge doesn't seem to make any difference at all in any sexual behavior," said Janet E. Rosenbaum of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, whose report appears in the January issue of the journal Pediatrics. "But it does seem to make a difference in condom use and other forms of birth control that is quite striking."

LIFE IS A BUMPY STINKER

Sometimes Christian bumper stickers let us know more than they want us to know.

Today I was following a van with a bumper sticker that read "Fear" and "Not" separated by a simple line-drawing crucifix. I began to contemplate the occasion of this admonition. To whom were they appealing with their fear/not message? Certainly not to me or mine. My fears are mostly necessary and reasonable, like the fear of stepping in front of a moving vehicle or jumping off a thousand foot cliff without a parachute on. Also a more distant yet healthy fear of religions that might want to turn my America into a theocracy ruled by one or other dominant religion. No, they certainly weren't appealing to me with that admonition.

Then I realized she was signaling to other Christians with her message. And I felt pretty certain she wasn't talking about the fear of jumping in front of moving cars or off high cliffs. No, she was telling her Christians friends not to be afraid of something else. What was it? What is so big a fear that she had to constantly assure other Christians not to be afraid?

I continued contemplating and, then, it came to me, and, simultaneously, I realized why we all must feel sad for the average Christian life. She was telling her friends not to fear life, the fear that lives at the center of their lives. They live in fear, I realized. What kind of fears so haunt them that they must go around telling one another, "Don't be afraid. Don't be afraid." Like children whistling past the graveyard? What is so scary about the Christian inner view of the life we all share that they sound so miserable with their bumper stickers while the rest of us see a normal, sometimes happy, sometimes painful and always funny reality?

Soon I had a host of things that obviously make their lives miserable to them so that they often wish for death or say things like, "If I didn't have god I wouldn't want to be alive." Or "Without god I'd go crazy, run mad and kill and rob and rape." They certainly do fear life. Their god must not be any real comfort to them if they feel those things I've heard them express. Here's this all powerful friendly loving god who lets their lives fill up with fear. Or gives them a brain so full of awful things that they're afraid to live in it. Go figure.

Anyhow, I believe they fear things like god catching them sinning and going to hell for it. They fear their fellow churchgoers might discover at any moment they are as phony and fraudulent as most people in all faiths are much of the time. They must think they are surrounded by evil demons everywhere just waiting to snatch their frequent flier miles to heaven away from them. They must feel personally responsible for all the suffering they see in others all around them. They must feel driven to convert as many people in the world to their way of thinking so that they won't feel so all alone. Yet in America, surrounded by so many like themselves, they don't feel safe. The bumper sticker itself testifies to that. Why would they feel any safer if all of Africa went Christian? Would anything really change inside their heads or out in the world since the world out there is only their projection of the world inside themselves? The world is only as bad or as unbearable as it feels like it is inside their heads. How they feel has nothing to do with the way the world is. The Cosmos just is and it will keep being as it is until the cows come home, or at least until the sun engulfs our planet in a fiery embrace.

Let me tell you—I'm not up on a soapbox, mouthing platitudes here. I'm just as flawed as your average Christian. I've learned what I've just said from personal experience. I've see my own view of the world flipflop in a second's time from happy to fearful. So I don't go around with bumper stickers telling everyone to become an atheist and they'll stop having the occasional fear. No, there is no magic wand for happiness. All I can say is that life is a mixed bag and there's no escape from the terrors, even if you believe that Santa Claus is up there in heaven, waiting with golden wings to attach to your shoulder blades. Because if you can't actually see Santa up there (or the Spaghetti Monster) with the actual wings with your name tag on them, then, no matter how hard you deny it, you'll still have doubts and fall into fear and put little bumper stickers on your bumpers in an attempt to make yourselves feel better.

Hey, that was longer than I meant it to be. When I go riffing, I tend to riff it up.

WILLIAM STYRON (1925-2006) on TERRY SOUTHERN

"I had met a lot of Texans in the marines, most of whom lived up to their advance reputation for being yahoos and blowhards, and I never thought I'd encounter a Texan who was a novelist. Or a Texan who was rather shy and boastful."

I added that quote for a not so obvious reason. You see... I'm not the only one down on Texans. While I'm at it, here's some more from William Styron (author of two great novels I've read—Sophie's Choice and Confessions of Nat Turner):

“I thought of Terry [Southern] recently when I read, in an interview, the words of a British punk-rock star, plainly a young jerk, nasty and callow but able to express a tart intuitive insight: ‘You Americans still believe in God and all that shit, don't you? The whole fucking lot of you fraught with the fear of death.’

“Terry would have given his little cackle of approval at the remark, for it went to the core of his perception of American culture. Like me, Terry was an apostate southern Protestant, and I think that one of the reasons we hit it off well together was that we both viewed the Christian religion—at least insofar as we had experienced its puritanical rigors as a conspiracy to deny its adherents their fulfillment as human beings. It magnified not the glories of life but the consciousness of death, exploiting humanity's innate terror of the timeless void. High among its prohibitions was sexual pleasure. In contemplating Americans stretched on the rack of their hypocrisy as they tried to reconcile their furtive adulteries with their churchgoing pieties, Terry laid the groundwork for some of his most biting and funniest satire. Christianity bugged him, even getting into his titles—think of The Magic Christian. Nor was it by chance that the surname of the endearing heroine of Candy was—what else?—Christian. His finest comic efforts often come from his juxtaposing a sweetly religious soul—or at least a bourgeois-conventional one—with a figure of depravity or corruption. Candy was surely the first novel in which the frenzied sexual congress between a well-bred, exquisitely proportioned young American girl and an elderly, insane hunchback could elicit nothing but helpless laughter. (‘Give me your hump!’ she squeals at the moment of climax, in a jeu de mots so obvious it compounds the hilarity.) One clear memory I have is of Terry in the lounge car, musing over his Old Grand-Dad as he considered the imminent demise of the Super Chief and, with it, a venerable tradition. His voice grew elegiac speaking of the number of ‘darling Baptist virgins aspiring to be starlets’ who, at the hands of ‘panting Jewish agents with their swollen members,’ had been ever so satisfactorily deflowered on these plush, softly undulating banquettes.”

From William Styron’s Havanas In Camelot, pp.116-118

WHERE FALWELL GOT HIS WELL-FALLEN IDEA FOR BLAME FROM

“. . . the Diet of Worms, the same assembly that condemned Martin Luther for heresy, issued a mandate declaring that the ‘evil pocks’ [syphilis] was a scourge visited upon mankind for the sin of blasphemy.” —Styron also, from the same book as above