Terrorists win! Terrorists win!

It's hard to say they didn't and their victory has nothing to do with the incompetence that let Osama bin Laden escape from Afghanistan. What can you call it but a victory when we've borrowed and wasted trillions on wars that we simply can't afford and we've been torn apart politically and culturally to the point where we will defend the indefensible, accept the unacceptable and every passing cloud seems like a piece of the sky falling.




Nearly nine years after the attacks on New York and Washington, the World Trade Center towers have become like the relics of some saint to be preserved in some myth if not in a jar while the contrived phrase "they hate us for our freedoms" echoes in mockery while one by one, the freedoms we pretend are a reason for their resentment are put against a wall and shot -- by us.

Any war, just or unjust, aggressive or defensive, necessary or the result of lies, is a test of the freedoms of speech and of the press. This alleged war has been a test of freedom from unreasonable searches as well, but now even freedom of religion is being tested both in the legislature and by the propaganda organizations with seemingly unlimited money, power and influence over the rage addled minds of the public. The millions of riders on the New York Transit system will soon be reading ads showing yet another picture of the twin towers and an airliner along with a crescent. Why There? it asks. Because we have freedom of religion, I answer. Because the government may not legislate against the free exercise of a religion or determine that one religion is to be preferred over another, I say to the ignorant, uncaring mob and the sinister forces that play them like pawns.

Does anything support the myth, popular in Islamic countries, that the US is out to destroy them and to kill Muslims better than this ad, this attitude, this anger? Of course we're eager to engineer Armageddon and so are they. Of course the Terrorists have won, since to bankrupt and confuse us and weaken us and set us against our principles and best interests was exactly what they set out to do. A popular uprising against justice and the rule of law has been the goal of many but none has been so successful in my lifetime as what has been accomplished by bin Laden and the Neocon Republicans with the aid of various radical supremacist groups foreign and domestic.

Why there? Well to be truthful it isn't there, only near there, but the answer is the same as it is to the question of why we didn't forbid radical Christian churches in Oklahoma City or the political anti-government speech that brought about the Federal Building attack and continues to fester. Because we all have the right to worship without interference from anti religious groups and from the government. That would be the government that's supposed to stay out of our lives, but only if we're of an approved religion.

We don't forbid KKK meetings even in neighborhoods full of people the Klan hates. We allow Tea Party extremists to wave guns at political rallies and threaten the lives of the president's family and to overthrow the government by force. We allow Christian churches to preach about the coming destruction of the Jews, the infidels and the end of the world anywhere they damn well please. But they're not Muslims, as a rule.

Our founding fathers offered praise for Islam, told Muslim leaders this was not a Christian country. There have been Muslim citizens in this country for centuries. There are millions of born in the USA Muslims in civilian and military life. When you take away the rights of one citizen for illegal reasons, you take away the rights of all and indeed if "they" hate us for being free, they're effective in making us less so and with our eager cooperation.

There's a bell tolling for us, for our freedom, for our souls and that thing up there in the steeple, wrapped in the flag and ringing it doesn't look anything like Osama.

No Muslims here!

I have to be thankful to the Anti-Defamation League, for without them, I might not be living here and they've done much to silence the skinheads and neo-Nazis and Jew haters that would still kill us all if they could. They've done much to get Church printing presses to stop printing the infamous "protocols" fraud and making them stop teaching that kill Christian babies for their blood. But as I've said countless times, being persecuted doesn't make one virtuous.

The ADL has jumped on the out of control bandwagon, protesting the building of the "Ground Zero Mosque" which isn't a mosque and isn't at Ground Zero. I don't know how to describe that without displaying it as offensive to the freedom of religion which is one of the few things an American can point to as being fundamentally American in origin, albeit no longer unique.

To what do we owe the self-righteous attitude behind it? We're furious at a group of terrorists almost small enough to fill a school bus and most of whom are dead: so furious that we don't want anyone to worship the God of Abraham in a different way within our sight. So furious that we will ignore the prohibition against establishing a religion as permissible or not permissible or restricting the rights of one as opposed to another. If Muslims have no right to a community center in New York, they have no right to a community and if they have not that, we have not reason to see this as a country worth supporting

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Desert Cross

"the Constitution does not oblige government to avoid any public acknowledgment of religion's role in society"

said Supreme Court Justice Anthony M. Kennedy. The Cross may be an affirmation of Christian beliefs but it's also used to "honor and respect heroism." The cross he refers to of course is the one erected 75 years ago in the Mojave Desert to "honor" the dead of the First World War, including those without Christian beliefs; those whose own beliefs were inimitable to and lives diminished by those with Christian beliefs. Yes, Tony, there are and were atheists in foxholes: Jews, Muslims, animists, Unitarians and others -- and no Tony, that cross doesn't salute them be they heroes or clerk-typists: it salutes you and your religion at their expense and mine. It doesn't acknowledge that there are religious people in America, it tells you they're the ones who count most.

"Here, one Latin cross in the desert evokes far more than religion. It evokes thousands of small crosses in foreign fields marking the graves of Americans who fell in battles, battles whose tragedies are compounded if the fallen are forgotten"

continued Kennedy hoping apparently that in the passionate flaunting of murky emotional tropes we will forget that the most moving of war memorials contains nothing but names: hoping apparently that you've never been to one of those cemeteries in Europe and seen the graves marked by the Star of David and memorializing bones than didn't fight for or die to uphold Christianity or an allegedly Christian nation. The Desert Cross isn't designed to help us remember anyone but to remember Jesus of the Gospels. Waving a cross in their dead faces isn't designed to be a memento of them, but a proud rebuke toward others and another bit of puffed-up braggadocio in the same fashion as our traditional bully-boy patriotism. We're number one -- and that's because we're Christian.

What Judge Tony is saying here is that they don't matter, they don't deserve to matter; don't deserve the dignity of being buried without alien iconography. What America is hearing is that we can't spare a dime for Public TV but putting up and maintaining Christian symbols on public property is public duty because the United States of America would really be the Christian States of America God wants it to be if we hadn't allowed those people in.

"The cross is not a universal symbol of sacrifice. It is the symbol of one particular sacrifice, and that sacrifice carries deeply significant meaning for those who adhere to the Christian faith"

states Justice Steven's dissenting, and historically correct opinion, an opinion soon to retire from the bench. The symbol does not represent the United States, it does not represent all of us or describe what we're about. It does not remind us of the unnecessary and pointless slaughter of the Great War conducted by the Christian kings of Christian nations asserting Christian values. It does not remind us that we have a secular government and we designed it and maintain it to protect our individual beliefs and our right to practice our creeds and sects and religions without government interference and coercion, be it subtle or overt.

Once again we have been made aware of how precarious is our freedom of conscience, our freedom from interference in our private beliefs and our right to be included as Americans in a state that is under relentless religious pressure to be exclusive. We have a Court willing, it seems, to reevaluate and revisit many things we thought were decided and that would be a great many things indeed if next year's Court leaned more heavily toward giving our government a more religious stance when it comes to matters of morality. We can expect some serious fervor surrounding the next appointment. If you value religious freedom and indeed if you value religion itself, maybe now's the time to pray.

God is not religious?

And invoking God on our currency is not religious either, or so say the judicial theologians sometimes known as the Federal Appeals Court. The California court decided 2 to 1 to overturn their own 2002 ruling that sided with atheist Michael Newdow's complaint that doing so established a State Monotheistic religion and violated the constitutionally mandated separation of church and state. Did they see the light, or did they feel the heat?

Why? It may seem hard to us to accept that God is not a religious figure or concept, but the reasoning behind the decision: that the government's power is limited by God's power, certainly is a religious atatement and even more certainy is at odds with the Constitution and the philosophy behind it. In fact the Biblical God seems very much against the idea of choosing leaders by popular vote if you remember the fate of Saul and that European Christians could be excommunicated for voting well into the 19th century.

The "pledge of allegiance" is also constitutional said the majority.

"The pledge of allegiance serves to unite our vast nation through the proud recitation of some of the ideals upon which our Republic was founded and for which we continue to strive,"

the two judges said. An interesting concept seeing as both of these shibboleths are rather recent and the founders of the Republic would have started a second revolution if they were around. I never feel more disunited with my countrymen than when at various club functions I have to stand up like a schoolchild and swoon over a symbol and affirm somebody else's religious delusion. Of course I always say "Under Fogg" but that's another matter.

As I've reminded my readers many times, the pledge was not originally about God or its relationship to our Republic, it was about the flag and nationalism and freedom and justice, two out of four of which are good ideas. Forcing children to swear to pray to God in a public school is an abomination and an attempt to punish people who do not believe. That everyone else has come to see this as a part of every public and private meeting or convocation is just silly, but the real comedy is watching federal judges bend over so far backward to be fair to people of superstition that their heads might just as well be fully inserted.

The Irish Inquisition

I watched Julia Sweeney in Letting Go of God on Showtime the other night. Seeing how her thought processes led her at first to reject Biblical literalism and finally Theism and religion in general, put a big smile on my face since it mirrored my own in so much detail. For some reason it seems like the large majority of atheists I know come either from Roman Catholic or Jewish backgrounds but I won't speculate here about the reasons.



There is evidence that religiosity in the US is on the decline, with fewer people seeing religion as a solely positive influence and more feeling that religious teachings are out of date, but of course the opposition makes a lot of noise and has a lot of political power. I don't know whether any of the above applies in heavily Catholic Ireland, but the anti-blasphemy law which went into effect yesterday is sure to be challenged and the high profile of some of the challengers is sure to cause considerable embarrassment to those who have to enforce it. Whether Catholics in Ireland are as likely to let go of God as they are elsewhere, those in Ireland who have and those of other traditions are going to have a field day.

The Irish constitution extends religious freedom only to Christians and that may be a surprise to many who see Europe in general as moving away from belief and from Church domination. It's worthy of curiosity to see whether the ordinary practice of other religious traditions will constitute blasphemy as well. Will it be blasphemous to say that Jesus was not the actual son of God but permissible to accuse Jews of murdering him and of eating Christian babies? I guess we'll see. Will showing Letting go of God be punishable? Will it be illegal to publish Nietzsche, or Dawkins? Michael Nugent, chairman of Atheist Ireland calls this idea

"dangerous because it incentives [sic] religious outrage, and because Islamic states led by Pakistan are already using the wording of this Irish law to promote new blasphemy laws at UN level."

Dangerous indeed and so diametrically opposed to American views of religion -- at least as reflected by those who wrote the Constitution -- that an attempt to import it to the US wouldn't be surprising. I remember former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani's attempt to close the Brooklyn Museum because of a painting he considered blasphemous. ( it wasn't) Many people still wish ihe could have been successful.

The US constitution certainly does not grant special rights to Christians or to any other religious groups and that fact seems to be a massive thorn in the side of the religious right; a thorn they'd love to remove and I will be amazed if some Republican doesn't attempt to introduce something similar by next Christmas. The test of the Irish law is in whether it outrages a large number of people and if we had such a law within the viewership of Fox, we can be sure that outrage would flow forth like a mighty flood of medieval values upon the land and our courts would grind to a halt whild civilization is one again snatched from the jaws of victory.

Behind the veil

Legend has it that when the Nazis occupied Denmark, they ordered all the Jews there to wear yellow stars and that the King himself put one on his own clothing in order to show support. Of course it never happened there or anywhere else to my knowledge. Certainly not in France. I'm wondering though, if the draconian ban on wearing any Islamic garb that covers the face will elicit some French resistance to protest what seems to American eyes to be a violation of civil rights. No, I won't bet on it happening.

Although only some 400 women in France wear a Burqa, according to French intelligence services, the fear that Islamic extremists are a growing threat to peace and security in France and the rest of Europe is ever present. France has already passed a law banning the hijab and all other "conspicuous" religious symbols in state schools and the ruling party are proposing to deny citizenship to couples in which the woman wears a burqa.

"There are principles at stake: Extremists are putting the republic to the test by promoting a practice that they know is contrary to the basic principles of our country,"

says Jean-Francois Cope, the UMP party leader. So is he, I'd have to add, if that old Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité thing still stands taller in French eyes than ethnic purity.


I wouldn't be hard to find sympathy for banning yarmulkes, turbans, or any other religiously unique clothing in the US of A, but as yet, we're still more liberal in that respect than our Gallic brethren. Long may it be so. I make no secret about my distaste for religion and my fear of what happens when religion and government become too close. Yes, I am all too aware that a large number of Muslims hate our country so much that the random slaughter of innocents seems justified in their eyes, but meddling in anyone's right to express themselves by choosing clothing representing an affiliation or a belief is just such a dangerously close relationship and is anathema to me. No, I don't expect to see that happen here any time soon, but if it does, you'll be seeing me wearing anything they're throwing stones at be it monk's robes or djellaba -- and waving the flag.

Jesus laughed

"How dangerous it is in sensible things to use metaphorical expressions unto the people, and what absurd conceits they will swallow in their literals."

-Thomas Browne - Pseudoxia Epidemica-

Making sense out of someone else's religion is a bit like looking at a jigsaw puzzle where the pieces don't all fit and some are taped in place or hidden under others. Take the Mary and Joseph story. We're supposed to believe that since Joseph was too old to have sex with his obscenely young bride Mary, her pregnancy was a bit of a surprise - until of course she told him that God, in the form of a bird, did the deed. The subsequent pregnancies resulting in brothers and sisters might have been harder to explain, unless the bird left some blue pills for the old man -- or unless we ignore old Occam: "entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem" which means don't make shit up just so people won't laugh at your bogus story.

That of course would have Jesus' brother Jacob the true heir to the throne of David, making him the Messiah; because after all, Joseph, from whose family the title was inherited, wasn't his real father. OK, so we don't ask and we just tape that piece in place and ignore what is underneath.

Anyway, one can choose to treat the alleged divinity of Jesus as a metaphor, which makes sense, or literally, which makes absolutely none. If you're of the latter persuasion, which didn't approach universality for many centuries into the Christian Era, (if it ever really did) the flimsiness of your construction is likely to make you touchy and humorless if not aggressively pugnacious. Imagine the fundamentalist's reaction to a poster showing A young Joseph in bed with a frustrated looking Mary and titled "Poor Joseph, God was a hard act to follow."



The Church that put up the billboard in Aukland, New Zealand simply wished to point out the absurd conceit of swallowing this literal fundamentalist interpretation. Archdeacon Glynn Cardy of The St Matthew-in-the-City Anglican church said he wanted to inspire people to talk about the Christmas story: to challenge a fundamentalist interpretation that's obviously pasted together from pieces torn from other religions, rather than swallowing the cocktail.

"What we're trying to do is to get people to think more about what Christmas is all about. Is it about a spiritual male God sending down sperm so a child would be born, or is it about the power of love in our midst as seen in Jesus?"

Predictably, it wasn't well received by those who demand that everyone else swallow the same mind numbing potion and within hours an irate man was trying to paint over the image. Local Catholic spokesmen were up in arms and a "conservative" group called Family First was calling the whole thing irresponsible. It's nice to know that "conservatives" despise religious freedom in New Zealand as much as they do here. I mean it's one thing to be able to speak out against secular authority, but suggesting that God's own sacred chicken doesn't make half breed, wholly God children with young girls who somehow remain virginal throughout multiple pregnancies and births! What fools these mortals be!

If only I could claim such protection against people who disagree with me.

All I want for Christmas is a silver bullet

Christmas in these new dark ages is like a full moon to werewolves and lunatics and the USA is the new Transylvania. You can almost hear them howling at night. In the dark, ruined castle of the House of Representatives, the latest time wasting assault on truth, the Constitution, freedom of religion and the Founding Fathers is H. RES. 951, a resolution drafted by 19 house Republicans stating:

Whereas Christmas is a national holiday celebrated on December 25; and

Whereas the Framers intended that the First Amendment of the Constitution, in prohibiting the establishment of religion, would not prohibit any mention of religion or reference to God in civic dialog: Now, therefore, be it

Resolved, That the House of Representatives--

(1) recognizes the importance of the symbols and traditions of Christmas;

(2) strongly disapproves of attempts to ban references to Christmas; and

(3) expresses support for the use of these symbols and traditions by those who celebrate Christmas.

The framers have been framed once again, it seems. Of course there is no prohibition against "mentioning" religion, but there sure as Madison is one against promoting one religion over another and establishing support for any belief or ceremony or symbol is as prohibited as Jefferson could make it -- the ignorant passion of the lawless Republican denialists notwithstanding.

No I'm not going into the open hostility the Constitution writers had toward organized religion and it's influence on Government, or the largely fraudulent claims that "liberals" hate Christmas and Christians and want to take away your Christmas tree. You either already know or you're one of the hairy palmed lycanthropoids, too demented to listen. For my part however, any party that harbors such Visigoths (yes they were Christian) is illegitimate to the core, an enemy of religious freedom and unworthy to participate in government on any level.

Is it humorous that the only real effort to stamp out Christmas and its various and ever changing "traditions" was by the "pilgrim fathers" we just finished pretending were the founders of American democracy. It would almost be laughable if these worms weren't eating the heart out of liberty by trying to restore exactly the sort of government we fought a revolution to rid ourselves of.

We've got 15 more days of raging Republicans who are going to make up stories about stores not having Christmas trees, towns banning lights or private business owners not having the right to call Christmas a holiday -- or private citizens not having the right to celebrate it or not celebrate it when and how they please. We have at least two more weeks of support for tyranny and attacks on our freedom of speech, press and religion. It's more than just some Scrooge, more than just some Grinch stealing everyone's good time, it's the ancient evil of religious authority stealing our birthright and for me, the holiday I used to love is hardly worth it any more.

Life is not a Rolex - a Rolex is not alive

"Comprehensible to the intelligent, to the world at large, needing interpretation"

-Pindar-
___________________________

Ah, Pastor Rick Warren -- not quite smart enough to realize that his arguments have long since been steamrollered by better minds or just smart enough to realize that enough people are ignorant of it for him to make a living by peddling delusion? That is the question.

Put Rick on the list of people deeply disturbed by a sign on a bus saying belief in invisible magic spirits isn't necessary if you want to be good to your fellow humans. In fact he's been in terror of disbelief for a long time, resorting often to such idiocies as the idea that Atheists must be wrong because they're angry, that Atheists are responsible for most of the worlds wars and atrocities including being responsible for the Spanish Inquisition. I have to admit, even I didn't expect that.

No, it's ridiculous not to believe in magic and the supernatural and forces and places for which there is no evidence other than the failure to understand nature. You see, if Pastor Warren is walking down a mountain and finds a rock - that could be accidental, but if he finds a Rolex, it's "design."

Again, it's easily comprehensible to the rare intelligent American that Rolex's do not occur in nature,nor are they alive and self reproducing, but things, like living cells and viruses can indeed result from natural processes which is liberally illustrated by evidence and that Warren is trotting out this mawkish and moronic argument only because, as I said, there are enough congenitally and willfully stupid people out there to be blind to his festival of fatuous fallacies. It's not an argument at all really, it's just a bad analogy and an attempt to shift the burden of proof as Dawkins' The Blind Watchmaker illustrates with greater patience and a good deal more skill than I have.

Warren doesn't have enough faith to be an atheist, he says in an attempt to make science and evidence and logic and knowledge a false equivalent of ignorance and the will to believe. Again, if you're intelligent, nobody has to explain it to you any more than I would have to explain why, contrary to his lies belief, same sex marriage is not just like pedophilia and neither Tomas de Torquemada nor the Holy Office at the Vatican were atheists.

But almost everybody believes in the supernatural he says, bringing the ad populum fallacy up to bat. "The actual number of secularists in the world is actually quite small outside of Europe and Manhattan," he continues, adding an appeal to people who find an educated populace threatening. The place for Secular Humanists is North Korea, whines Warren. It's called "poisoning the well" for anyone interested and yes, it's in any book of popular fallacies. That he doesn't tell us that the place for blind faith in religious authority is in the Taliban, isn't surprising, but it is telling.

Of course if the future of the world is not secularism but as he reminds us: pluralism, a certainty that certainly lacks support as we see beliefs declining as education ( and intelligence) increases, it's hard to understand that we should accept a multiplicity of religions but not Secular Humanism. What then does Humanism lack that theistic religion has? Authority. It's rather hard to base a tyranny or any system of arbitrary authority on it and that, dear reader, is what Rick Warren is all about and that's why he's afraid and that's why he has to make fun of your freedom.

Just a baby

Why is Fox News so damned afraid of secular Humanism? They're not of course; they're afraid of failing ratings and growing irrelevance, so they tell me once again and right on schedule that I'm at war with my favorite holiday because I'm not at war with my freedom -- and yours. If you think that virtue is its own reward or that doing the right thing by others whether or not you're rewarded for it is by definition the right thing: in fact, if you believe in freedom of thought, perhaps you're at war with Christmas too.

Last year, the American Humanist Association ran an ad asking "Why believe in a God?" They did it again this year with No God ...No Problem signs on city buses and the point of the slogan Be Good for Goodness Sake although certainly not out of line with most religious teachings, can according to the slimy logic of Bill O'Reilly, not only be a direct slander against God, but worse; an attack on the poor, helpless, little baby Jesus.

"How do you sell Atheism by running down a baby"

asks lyin' Bill so glibly that he can hope that the right people won't notice that being a good person, having compassionate and kindly humanist values, isn't likely to run down anyone's baby.

Blindingly blond and botoxed Margaret Hoover and Gretchen Carlson grinned in frightening fashion during last Thursday's "Culture Warriors" episode although the 85 year old O'Reilly couldn't seem to remember which was who. Perhaps the beauty pageant grins were as sewn on as they looked or perhaps the grotesque lengths Fox has gone to demonstrate the dangers of freedom simply amused them, but Grinning Gretchen opined that

"This is a direct and deliberate smear against Christianity. Do you think they would do this ad in July?"

Well, St. Swithyn's day seems hardly worth the effort and after all, December is in some vague and fact-free fashion "the most sacred month" Easter notwithstanding. There's little of ritually sacred nature in July that needs to be forced down the throats of heretics, while December contains other holidays of other religions and the birthdays, of Horus, Mithra, Constantine's favorite Sol Invictus and other Jesus predecessors -- but never mind. She managed to sneak in the proposition that not being Christian, not loudly professing faith that Jesus was born coincidentally on the same day as the Roman and Persian gods he replaced and not in April as their Gospels state, is an attack on our established State Religion.

"Do you think they would do it against Allah on Ramadan? I don't think so! No."

said Lyin' Bill in turn and nicely adding the subliminal hint that the growing secularism of the Western world is actually to be laid at the feet of our Islamic President.

"Why does the American Humanist Society want us to be 'good for goodness sake'? Why do they loathe the baby Jesus? He's just a baby."

What a marvelous way to heap fallacy upon fiction upon fraud and turn it into a call to battle. Is it really offensive to anyone's religion to recommend that in doing good unto others, one should not do it for reasons of prestige or self elevation - or that being a good person without doing it from fear of a vengeful son of a god is not really good?

Allowing people to believe or doubt or disbelieve anything they like can only be offensive to a religion that seeks only to convert and control and not to improve mankind. That's just the kind of religion and perhaps the kind of politics O'Reilly and his attendant familiars would be advocating if they really were advocating anything rather than fabricating reasons for rage in those whose mental capabilities don't extend to debunking a train of logic leading from "we don't have to believe in your god to be good" to "Why do they loathe the baby Jesus? He's just a baby."

The real questions of course are about why the two-bit Torquemada clones at Fox News loathe people who aren't fundamentalist Christian Conservatives, why lying and bearing false witness in the service of a myth is not loathsome while freedom of thought is an offense to the "baby Jesus."

Social tolerance and immigration

It's an ethical dilemma that I don't find easy to solve. Are the Swiss wrong to forbid the building of mosques? Are Londoners only being racist or xenophobic in opposing the Abby Mills Mosque or are they legitimately protecting themselves from the strife, turmoil, noise and sometimes the violence said to be growing in formerly calm, ecumenical and liberal countries? Is the curtailment of religious freedom justified in some cases? Yes, in the US, we have to fight for the idea that the free exercise of Christianity does not convey the right to push non-Christians around, but just how far do our own laws concerning religious freedom extend and how far should we let them extend?

Like many people, I'm uneasy when a Swiss party leader calls for the banning of Muslim and Jewish cemeteries and we all know the horrible history of sectarian strife in Europe such measures evoke. Yet I see how the Liberal Netherlands has to deal with what appears to many of them as a growing population opposed to the secular, liberal and highly permissive culture they are so proud of and I can sympathize. By sympathising however, with people whose hard won freedom is put in jeopardy by a growing sub-culture, am I able to disassociate myself from groups who want to close the American borders to anyone who might not look Anglo Saxon or be Protestant? How much of the Dutch, Swiss and American fear of a large Muslim presence is real and how much is misguided? When is ethnic cleansing not ethnic cleansing? Most importantly, can we even discuss these things over the snarling of the trolls?