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ABC Nightline: De-Baptism by Blow-Dryer
Sunday, August 1st, 2010Is the Vatican a Sovereign State?
Wednesday, June 2nd, 2010
by Christopher Hitchens
Elena Kagan and her colleagues in the solicitor general’s office say it is. They should be ashamed.
Those scrutinizing the nomination of Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court might want to pay some attention to the recent decision of her office—the office of the solicitor general of the United States—to take the side of the Vatican in the continuing scandal of child rape and the associated scandal of a coordinated obstruction of justice. Faced with a number of court cases in the United States that have named the pope himself as a defendant in the enabling and covering up of many rapes, the Vatican has evolved the strategy of claiming that the Holy See is in effect a sovereign state and thus possessed of immunity from prosecution. It has now been announced that the Obama administration will be advising the Supreme Court to adopt this view of the matter.
There are a number of fascinating ramifications of this opinion. It is not usually considered polite to mention that the majority of Supreme Court justices are practicing Roman Catholics. (Writing about this delicate matter during the argument over the nomination of John Roberts, I did warn that there might come a day when it could pose a double conflict of interest, both in respect of church teachings and in respect of the Vatican’s decision to shelter Cardinal Bernard Law of Boston after he skipped town to avoid a subpoena. This was before it came to light that the current pope had been so deeply and personally involved in the church’s strategy of delay and obfuscation.) We will soon have a Supreme Court that contains no Protestants and no secularists and which is being asked to rule on a matter central to the religious beliefs of a majority of its members, who are bound to regard the man formerly known as Joseph Ratzinger as the vicar of Christ on earth. If they now take refuge in the lesser claim that he is the bureaucratic head of a foreign government, will that serve to assuage their consciences?
Even if they do decide the matter in this way, they will not succeed in banishing the terrible question of Vatican responsibility for the destruction of so many childhoods and the protection of so many hardened criminals. To give just one example that has not so far had the attention it deserves, the State Department is required by Congress to make an annual report on the human rights record of every government with which we have relations. Yet there is no annual human rights report on the Vatican—or Vatican City or the Holy See, if you prefer. When questioned on this rather glaring lacuna, officials at Foggy Bottom say that for human rights purposes, the Vatican is not a state. It enjoys, for example, only the status of an observer at the United Nations. Very well then, if the Supreme Court rules that it is a sovereign government, then it necessarily follows that it must be subjected to official scrutiny on its rights practices, which in international law include the treatment of children. It will be interesting to see how the Obama administration gets itself off the horns of that dilemma. (It is also perhaps a pity that this question was not resolved earlier, so that we could have had an official U.S. government report on, say, the open complicity of the Catholic Church and the papacy in sheltering the men who organized the genocide in Rwanda.)
Read the rest at: Slate.com
Julia Sweeney – Letting Go Of God
Sunday, May 16th, 2010
While Bill O’Reilly and his fellow right-wing bully boys were busy defending Christmas against the creeping secular threat to Western civilization by saying Happy Holidays, they should have taken a side trip to Hollywood, where a self-deprecating Irish former Catholic has been happily demolishing the entire edifice of Christianity.
In Julia Sweeney’s monologue
“Letting Go of God“,her particular crisis of faith is prompted, paradoxically, by two Mormon missionaries, who bring her up short with the question Do you know that God loves you? She’d always felt God’s love, she tells us, but the query prompts her to explore for the first time, rationally, what she knows about God.
Naturally, she heads to the source, the Bible, and that’s where the trouble starts. Rather than being an inspiring document of God’s love and a blueprint for a holy life, the Bible she discovers is an internally inconsistent, blood- and depravity-soaked indictment of a vengeful, jealous tribal madman. As poetry, it’s a psychedelic nightmare; as philosophy, it’s an incoherent mess; as the literal word of God, it contradicts itself about the origin of Adam and Eve in the first two chapters of Genesis.
Sweeney’s priest tries to guide her, but the answer always comes down to faith. Religious historian Karen Armstrong advises in her writing that the Bible isn’t literally true, but is psychologically true. So are The Iliad and The Odyssey, or any number of foundational myths, Sweeney argues. What makes this one true? Wherever she turns, she’s advised to ignore what’s before her eyes, or to see it through faith.
Here is Sweeney’s great rebellion: She simply cannot accept short-circuiting her reason in order to believe. As poignant as her quest is, it’s mercifully filtered through her neighborly, self-effacing charm.
She finances a spiritual trip to Nepal through the humiliating experience of filming the straight-to-video sequels Beethoven 3 and 4. She explores self-pleasuring as a teen under the dreamy gaze of a matinee-idol portrait of a blue-eyed Jesus. She does a wicked Hayley Mills imitation.
Her family is a source of warmth and trepidation. She tells her mother she s been reading the Bible, and the unexpected response is, Why on Earth would you do that? When Sweeney informs her she doesn’t believe in God anymore, Mom wants assurance Julia’s not leaving the church. Her father wishes she had instead announced she was gay: At least that’s socially acceptable. But acceptance, if not understanding, does come.
The moments Sweeney chooses to dramatize are the highlights of the piece, no matter how short. The tight-lipped disapproval of church busybodies at her father’s funeral suggest entire worlds in a few deft strokes.
Whether skewering Deepak Chopra in a phrase that ought to be stitched onto a pillow, imagining a public apology (for pretty much everything) from the Pope, or ripping up the intellectual sloppiness of intelligent design compromisers, her sweet-faced air of being constantly on the verge of public embarrassment takes the edge off material that s profoundly challenging to a vast majority of her fellow citizens. But, most of all, Sweeney is gently hopeful.
Looking into the howling abyss, she feels, not despair, but wonder. Lacking a God to seek out to heal the world’s ills, she feels a sense of responsibility. It’s our world, and welcome to it.
Watch the Julia perform the first 15 minutes of “Letting go of God” at TED
Dawkins on Absolute Morality
Monday, May 3rd, 2010Richard Dawkins answers the question:
How can atheists have absolute morality without a “leap of faith”?
Watch the entire episode here.
Judge Rules: National Day Of Prayer Unconstitutional
Sunday, April 25th, 2010
Annie Laurie Gaylor clicked through a flurry of e-mail messages warning her to repent or she would burn in hell.
“Herod,” one messenger called her.
Ms. Gaylor leaned back and sipped from a cup of tea, unfazed and even a bit surprised at the relative tameness of the attacks. Fresh from her latest godless triumph, she had expected more vitriol.
“It used to be a lot worse,” said Ms. Gaylor, 54, an atheist whose organization, the Freedom From Religion Foundation, recently won a suit in federal court here that declared the National Day of Prayer to be a violation of the First Amendment. “Things are changing. Society is becoming more secularized. It’s becoming acceptable to be atheist and agnostic. And there are more of us.”
The nation’s population continues to show signs of becoming less religious, according to the American Religious Identification Survey. The number of people in 2008 calling themselves atheist or agnostic, or stating no religious preference, is an estimated 15 percent, nearly double the percentage in the early 1990s. Around the country, nonbeliever clubs are springing up on college campuses.
Headquartered in a former Episcopal rectory in the shadow of the State Capitol, Freedom From Religion was founded in 1976 by Ms. Gaylor — then a student at the University of Wisconsin — and her mother, Anne Nicol Gaylor, who remains a fierce advocate for “free thought” at age 83. The co-president of the group is Annie Laurie Gaylor’s husband, Dan Barker, a former evangelical minister.
The Freedom From Religion Foundation claims a membership of more than 14,000, the largest group in the country advocating for atheists and agnostics. It has doubled its staff to eight in the last year, publishes a newspaper 10 times a year, Freethought Today, and has a weekly radio show. The group counts among its members and vocal supporters Janeane Garofalo, Christopher Hitchens and Ron Reagan.
Over the years, the group has won a suit to stop Bible instruction in a Tennessee school district, overturned a Madison law ordering businesses to close for hours on Good Friday and stopped a Colorado public school from requiring students to do volunteer work at churches.
The group’s biggest victory to date came last week when Judge Barbara B. Crabb of Federal District Court ruled that the federal government could not enact a law in support of prayer any more than it could “encourage citizens to fast during the month of Ramadan, attend a synagogue, purify themselves in a sweat lodge or practice rune magic.” The law, signed by President Harry S. Truman in 1952, calls on the president to sign a proclamation annually in observance of a National Day of Prayer.
The judge said the ruling would be stayed for 60 days to give the Obama administration, whose lawyers defended the prayer day in court, the chance to file an appeal. On Thursday, the White House said it would appeal and that, in the meantime, the president would sign this year’s prayer proclamation, as scheduled, on May 6.
The court ruling drew fire from the private National Day of Prayer Task Force. Michael Calhoun, a spokesman, described it as “an attack upon the religious heritage” of the nation. He criticized the Madison organization.
“It is a sad day in America when an atheist in Wisconsin,” he said, “can undermine this tradition for millions of others.”
It is still not easy being an atheist in public. No corporate group gives money to the foundation. Ms. Gaylor said she typically avoids making her views on political candidates public, calling it “the kiss of death” to be endorsed by an organization of nonbelievers.
She acknowledged voting for Mr. Obama, and expressed disappointment that his administration has defended the prayer day law. “I don’t give him a pass,” she said. “He’s a constitutional scholar. He knows we’re right.”
As a middle school student, young Annie Laurie would travel around the state with her mother, who barnstormed for feminist causes like legal abortion and access to contraceptives.
Children at school would sometimes look askance when they learned that she and her siblings were growing up without religion. “But there was a little envy, too,” she said. “It was like, ‘You mean you don’t have to get up in the morning and go to church?’ ”
The elder Ms. Gaylor, who wrote a book titled, “Abortion is a Blessing,” regarded religion as the enemy of equal rights for women. “I never liked fairy tales,” she said. “And I didn’t like people passing them off as truths.”
For his part, Mr. Barker, 60, grew up in Southern California and began evangelizing as a teenager. He left the ministry in his early 30s after coming to realize that he did not believe the Bible.
“I just had to fess up and say, ‘This is nonsense,’ ” Mr. Barker said.
He travels the country spreading the word of another sort — doing what his wife calls “reverse penance” — engaging in debates, delivering talks and offering musical performances in the name of godlessness. He plays the piano and sings atheist songs. One of his favorite numbers: “You Can’t Win Original Sin.”
Source: NY Times
Christopher Hitchens on Real Time with Bill Maher (March 26, 2010)
Saturday, March 27th, 2010Richard Dawkins Interview on Religion, Evolution and Iraq
Monday, March 22nd, 2010
By Matt Kennard
MK: Do you draw distinctions between religions? In terms of Islam and Christianity do you think they are both equally malicious and malign or do you think that one is worse than the other?
RD: Well in terms of the potential danger from blind faith there’s no difference between them. All faith is dangerous because all faith teaches that you don’t need to argue for your point of view – you just simply assert: this is my faith, this is what I believe, I don’t have to give reasons for belief. That is very dangerous. And in the case of Christianity the danger in practice was sort of played out in the Middle Ages and thereafter and Christianity has now more or less tamed it except in some extreme areas in America. In Islam it hasn’t and so what we’re seeing in Islam – they are now doing what Christianity used to do in the Middle Ages, in much more dangerous circumstances because now there are much more terrible weapons than the Crusaders, for example, ever had. Or than other Medieval Christians ever had.
So Islam is the big danger today because they have a Medieval mindset which bursts through into the twenty-first century.
MK: How far do you think the rise of this Medieval mindset can be put at the door of the West in terms of encouraging it in the 20th century?
RD: That is always a good point that one has to make. That the West in a way has been answering for trouble by its belligerent posture, for example, in the Iraq war. This has served to exacerbate political – that’s undoubtedly true. But I think it’s a sort of added affect over the precept of Islam.
MK: Do you think religion – I know your very anti-it – could it be described as an evolutionary mechanism to consolidate social relations and that type of thing?
RD: I believe that it probably does have to have some kind of evolutionary explanation. But you immediately slid into one particular hypothesis, which was social consolidation. That’s only one of many hypothesis that one could offer and it could be right but you don’t have to plump for that one when you talk about an evolutionary hypothesis.
MK: So it could be a whole manner of things?
RD: Yes. Social consolidation is not a very good evolutionary theory, by the way, because it doesn’t explain how it could have evolved. It says that in some vague sort of way it’s a good thing. But a vague good thing – there’s no rule that says it has to evolve. No absolutely not. I mean natural selection is a very specific process, which works by the differential survival of some kind of entities as opposed to alternative entities. In real biological evolution that usually means genes: that successful genes survive at the expense of unsuccessful genes. The reason they survive is that they are good at doing something: good at building bodies that fly or hunt or swim or whatever it is. To say that something that something is good for social consolidation doesn’t explain anything because it doesn’t say why natural selection would therefore favour it.
You could make a kind of group selection model. There are people who believe that natural selection works at the group level. That some groups survive while other groups don’t survive. Then you could say, well, groups that have a religion that causes social consolidation survive. Groups that don’t have a religion or have a less efficient religion don’t survive. And that is group selection but group selection is a very… I mean it’s controversial and I’m partisan in that controversy – I don’t think it works. This could be the one place where it does work but I would rather bring it down to the level of the individual and say: “What is it about the psychology of humans which makes them take to religion under the right circumstances? And how is it that that particular kind of psychology in the past made them more likely to survive and reproduce?”
Son of ‘God Hates Fags’ Preacher On Why He Left
Monday, March 22nd, 2010
When celebrity nonbeliever Richard Dawkins finished addressing his hundreds of Godless followers at the American Atheists Convention at Atlanta’s Emory Center last April, the follow up act was a man virtually no one in the room had ever heard of. Onto the dais walked a middle-aged, doleful-eyed cab driver from Cranbrook, B.C., by the name of Nate Phelps. He had come to talk about how his childhood in a religious household had brought him to atheism.
National Post Reporter Kevin Libin talks about Nate Phelps
Mr. Phelps was not from a typical churchgoing family, but from what a BBC documentary once called “the most hated family in America.” His father, pastor Fred Phelps, leads the Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kan. The family, and a handful of followers, has held nearly 43,000 demonstrations, mostly in U.S., a few in Canada, once in Iraq, picketing synagogues and Holocaust memorials, disrupting the funerals of American soldiers killed in action, and of murdered Amish schoolgirls. They are infamous for their hatred and cruelty. Their signs insist that “God Hates Fags,” and hates America, too, for tolerating homosexuality. They chant “Thank God for 9/11,” and for the bombs killing U.S. marines. They tried infiltrating the Winnipeg funeral in 2008 of Tim McLean, who was brutally murdered and decapitated on a Greyhound bus, calling it God’s punishment for Canadians’ sins, but backed off over fears for their safety. They march with broad smiles on their faces, their young children beside them, delighting in the outrage they provoke.
This is the family into which Nate Phelps was born 51 years ago and fled 33 years ago. At the time, his father had not yet graduated to street protests, but used a fleet of fax machines to broadcast his unabashedly hate-filled screeds to the world. Of his 12 brothers and sisters, only he and two others have deserted: The rest have grown Westboro with their own sons and daughters, inculcated in Pastor Phelps’ intolerant, Armageddonist preaching.
Nate Phelps was in Calgary this week, speaking to the University of Calgary’s Centre for Inquiry. Up until a year ago, he was driving a taxi in B.C.’s interior, quietly questioning God by soaking up in his off hours the anti-religion arguments of Mr. Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris. Today, as a faith-doubting refugee from Christianity’s ugliest extreme fringe, he has become, rather by accident, a figure in the North American atheist movement.
Sam Harris: Science can answer moral questions
Monday, March 22nd, 2010Campus Atheists Swap Free Smut In Exchange For Bibles
Thursday, March 4th, 2010A group of atheists at the University of Texas in San Antonio is trying to tempt college kids into trading their Bibles for pornography.
It’s part of a program called Smut for Smut sponsored by the student organization called Atheist Agenda.
On Monday, MSNBC’s Tucker Carlson welcomed the group’s president, Thomas Jackson, to ‘The Situation.”
