Tag Archives: secular

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‘24 A To Z Challenge – J

DOIN’ IT RIGHT ON THE WRONG SIDE OF TOWN

A distressing number of Christian Apologists take evolution-driven, secular, species-enhancing actions, like the Golden Rule.  First they claim that they/Christianity invented it, then they claim to have a monopoly on it.  They have to admit that non-believers – Jews, Muslims, and Atheists – do Good, and good things, but they insist that it’s not for the right reason – obedience to, and glorification of, their God.

When I was 12 years old, I discovered that my town had a monthly blood donor clinic.  Wanting to be a good citizen, I rushed down at the first opportunity.  I did this to produce secular good for society – for Mankind in general – The Greatest Good For The Greatest Number!  I did not do it from fear of celestial judgement and punishment, or to achieve some heavenly reward.

I quickly found that you have to be 18 to donate blood, so my idea of doing that specific good had to be put on hold – but not forgotten – for six years.  I showed up at the first clinic after my birthday, and was screened for suitability.  Did I have, or had I ever had, any one of a long list of disgusting illnesses??  I waved them all off.  I was young and healthy.  I hadn’t even had a chance to contract an STD.  I said that I’d only ever had measles, mumps, chicken pox, scarlet fever, and

JAUNDICE

Jaundice??!  Why lad, don’t you know that that’s hepatitis A?
Actually, I didn’t.  I’d never heard that term
Well son, that means that you will never be able to donate blood.

Starting in high school, the son donated blood every three months.  He even got a certificate from the Ontario Red Cross for donating 25 units of blood.  He was a big boy in school, and he got bigger as he matured.  I’ve got arms like his.  They’re attached to my ass.  He may be big, but he’s sensitive.

There are two sizes of huff-n-puff cuffs for taking blood pressure – regular, and large.  The son continued to grow, to the point that he showed up one month.  They slapped on the small cuff and inflated it till his eyes bulged.  It hurt like hell.  His blood pressure spiked from the pain, and they turned him away.

He returned the next month, and before they began, he asked about a large cuff.  Well, they had a few – in storage, and they would bring them next month.  In the meantime, they would use the small cuff and inflate it gently – which is like having a sharp pencil stuck into you – just slowly.   He got sharp pain!  His BP peaked, and he was turned away.

He returned the next month, but no-one had brought a large cuff.  He said, “I don’t know why I agreed to let them put that baby anaconda on my arm.  It hurt like hell.”  Again, blood pressure elevated, and again, he was refused.  He walked away with a jaundiced view of bureaucracy, shaking his head – and his arm, because it stung like shit – and never went back.

😮

Click on “Doin’ It Right,” above, to here Canada’s ‘April Wine’ version.

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Re-Ordering Prejudices

Some people believe that they are thinking, when they are really just re-ordering their prejudices.

I have to be very careful what I say to my Osteopath.  I don’t want to have to find a new one.  She’s an Evangelical Baptist.  She wasn’t raised as one.  She got it as a wedding present from her second husband.  Like a NEW anything, she’s taking it far too seriously.

At a recent visit, she was bragging about how she was brought up, and that her mother wasn’t biased, bigoted, or prejudiced.  Her best-friend neighbors across the street were a Negro family, she worked with an African woman, and a couple of new families on the block were Indian immigrants, and she got along well with them all.

She once said to her daughter, “People in other countries are just like us.  They get up and go to work or school like us.  We should respect them.”  Okay so far.  Then I mentioned a woman who I’d helped with a rail-travel problem.  I said that she had to go to Toronto to train as a wedding officiant.   👿

Hmmph, Atheist
Secular Humanist
Whatever they want to call themselves now.
They want to call themselves what they are.
If people don’t want to get married in a church, they should just go to a JP.
Perhaps they want a memorable ceremony, but just not a religious ceremony.
What’s wrong with a religious ceremony?
An officiant is often used at mixed-religion marriages.  Perhaps the Catholic doesn’t want to attend a Jewish Synagogue.  Maybe the Muslim doesn’t want to go to an Eastern Orthodox Temple.  Possibly the Moron Mormon doesn’t want to get married in a Christian Science reading room.

Until I identified her as a Secular Humanist, the officiant could have been a cross-carrying Catholic, trying to make a few extra bucks.  The Osteopath didn’t seem to be convinced, or very happy about how the discussion had gone.

The wife piped up to say that she doesn’t argue with me anymore, because My logic, and My Wordsmith abilities, always prove her wrong – like I have access to some special kind of logic that’s not  available to her.  When I prove someone wrong, it’s because they are wrong.  All you have to do to win, is present believable evidence.  In a discussion about any other topic, it may be possible to convince someone that they are mistaken.  Only with religion are the views so iron-bound.

I have carefully not used the term Atheist about any of the family, to her, but I did tell her that the Grandson and his wife used an Officiant (Not this one) at their ceremony in the Historic Mill-House in the park, to accommodate an inclusive array of religious and non-religious guests.
😀

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A House Built On Sand

The United States Constitution, you may be surprised to learn, mentions religion only twice: Once, in Article VI, where it states that “no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States,” and again, in the First Amendment, where it states that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” That’s it; you’ve now just read everything there is to read about religion in America’s most significant founding document.

This turns out to be an awkward revelation for the Christian nationalist; if the founders were, as Christian nationalists maintain, creating a “Christian nation,” it is quite odd that the words, God, Jesus, Christianity, and the like are entirely absent from the “supreme law of the land,” and that religion is only mentioned twice and in an entirely negative sense. Clearly, the US was established as a religiously neutral secular government—the first of its kind in the history of the world.

Frankly, I’m not sure how the founders could have been any clearer in their intentions without literally writing the words “THE U.S. IS NOT A CHRISTIAN COUNTRY.” Of course, some of the founders actually did write these words in the Treaty of Tripoli, which in 1797 was signed by President John Adams with the unanimous consent of the US Senate, and which says that “the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.”

We can keep going. While Thomas Jefferson’s exhortation for a “wall of separation” between church and state is well-known, what may be less well-known is that James Madison, the author of the Bill of Rights and father of the Constitution, was equally vociferous against the idea of mixing religion with government. On the issue of congressional chaplains, for example, Madison wrote, in the Detached Memoranda, “the establishment of the chaplainship to Congress is a palpable violation of equal rights, as well as of Constitutional principles.” He noted that minority religions would likely never achieve chaplainship, and, therefore, that the promotion of one religion above all others using government resources was a clear violation of constitutional principles—principles, keep in mind, that he would be very familiar with on account of the fact that he drafted them.

Further, note that the Constitution opens with the words “We the people,” which is a direct philosophical declaration that the government draws its power from the consent of the governed, not from a deity. Additionally, the idea that all persons are created equal, embodied in the Declaration of Independence, is fundamentally at odds with the idea of Christian supremacy. As one Supreme Court decision put it (before it was overtaken by conservative Christians), “A government cannot be premised on the belief that all persons are created equal when it asserts that God prefers some.”

Therefore, under no reasonable interpretation of the founding documents—not even and especially under the flawed, conservative interpretive scheme of originalism—can we possibly conclude that the country was founded as a “Christian nation.”

And yet that is exactly what the Supreme Court is attempting to turn the nation into, as constitutional attorney Andrew Seidel masterfully explains in his latest book, American Crusade: How the Supreme Court Is Weaponizing Religious Freedom. By analyzing several key Supreme Court cases over the last thirty years, Seidel shows us how these cases are being increasingly decided against the principles and sentiments of the founders—and against the best interests as a country.

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People Of Privilege

Bible

Much has been made in the media recently about “White Privilege.”  On the average, white people receive and achieve things better than people of other colors, generally the darker the hue, the greater the exclusion.  This ‘Angel Aura’ thing extends from jobs, wages and promotion, to housing, education, banking/financing, and general treatment by those in power (AKA lighter skin), particularly police.

White men came to this continent, and made it in their image.  They marginalized the Indians and other natives, and imported black slaves.  There were some who did disreputable things for financial and social gain, and there were some who performed unspeakable acts to justify eliminating anyone who ‘wasn’t them.’  Mostly, they did it from the perhaps-mistaken, but honestly-held belief that they and their way of life were superior.

So too, did the Christians come here and mold society so that they would reap the benefits, and all others would be ignored and excluded.  Some questions and comments on my recent Religism post, as well as some predictable “Christmas” articles, show that many Christians just don’t get it – or believe it.

Religism is real.  It’s the hatred of a particular faith or set of beliefs.  Some ‘Good Christians’ hate Jews. Many Muslims hate Jews, and also Christians.  Catholics hate Protestants.  Ego and insecurity drives it, and the hatred is often for the wrong reason, or for no reason at all.

The blind, unquestioning faith in the pre-eminence of Christianity often has its proponents mistakenly claiming Religism, when other groups’ rituals are included in secular life.  A woman writer recently spoke of knowing about Chanukah, Ramadan, Kwanzaa, Wiccan Solstice and the like – but wondered why they would want to celebrate at the same time as Christians, and exclude Jesus.

Because of her (and many others’) assumption of the universality of Christianity, it just never occurs to her that the members of these other religions all have their own year-end celebrations, which they would still practice if Christ had never existed.  A few of them have done so for thousands of years before Christianity came along.

There are the Christian haters who are the equivalent of the bigots who gave blankets infected with smallpox to the Indians, because they regarded them as sub-human.  Most of these folks however, are just the ones who have been subjected to the constant, low-level religious conditioning.  The Catholic Church calls it responsive reading, and catechism.  The Government does the same thing and labels it ‘brainwashing.’

Protecting one’s religious rituals can be a good thing – until you try to force them on others.  Inclusion of what is important to others is not exclusion of any portion of Christianity.  Falsely claiming Religism to justify a Christian-only secular public, makes Christians guilty of the same exclusionary tactics that they accuse others of.

A usually level-headed male newspaper writer pumped out a column labeled ‘Stop Diluting Christmas Traditions.’  It might better have been titled, ‘I ain’t gonna share!  You can’t make me.  I’m gonna take my ball and go home.’  A previously Catholic hospital had gone public.  Now funded by taxes from ALL citizens, it provided care for people of ALL faiths, and none.  They decided not to put up the usual nativity display.  Well, how DARE they??!

He was lost, because he couldn’t parade his faith, and held no-one else’s valid.  “It waves away the possibility of any faith.  It empties our plate, and bids us to eat.”  Actually, it removes the “His-only, a-la-carte” plate, and sets up a smorgasbord of beliefs to sample and compare, but there’s no trying religious chili or curry for him.  He’s a dedicated meat and potatoes Christian.

He complained that, “It’s like trying to speak language in the abstract, but no specific tongue,” apparently unlike me, studying all languages, or in this case religions, and seeing how they influence my favorite.

“It’s not a generic ‘Holiday Tree’, because there’s no generic holiday.”  It’s a generic Holiday Tree because it’s everybody’s ‘holiday’, Christmas included – just not exclusively Christian, even though that’s what he, and many like him, want and expect.  There’s reverse Religism here.  They just don’t see that they’re giving, not receiving.

The history teacher of the 15-year-old atheist son of one of the Free Thinkers was ranting about people who wouldn’t accept “proven historical facts.”  When one of the other students asked for an example, she came out with ‘the proven existence of Jesus Christ.’  School policy prohibits discussion of any single religion.  She was in the wrong, no matter how well-intentioned, or deluded.

Our lad pointed out that there was no ‘historical proof’ that Christ really existed.  “Well, it’s all right there, in the Bible!”  That may be, but no other contemporary Jewish – or Roman – document mentions Jesus, his exploits, his execution or his resurrection.  The boy was sent to the Principal, who chastised him for causing a disturbance in class.  No thinking allowed.  Believe what we tell you.

A local mall has a public meeting room which various community groups can book to present their particular points of interest.  The Free Thinkers recently requested a booking, and were, at least initially told, “We’re not sure you qualify as a ‘Community Group’.”  The Ontario Civil Rights Tribunal has dealt with Sofree(Southern Ontario Free Thinkers) as a community group dozens of times, establishing a precedent.  The president even has the complaint form document bookmarked on his smart phone.  A few keystrokes will rouse the Government to set them straight.

Too often, Christianity acts as a big, unthinking, entitled bully.  While less bloody, the difference between its head-in-the-sand stance, and ISIS’ off-with-their –heads methods, is one of only a minor degree. President Obama recently compared the atrocities of ISIS with the actions of the medieval Inquisition, and the usual suspects immediately began screaming about being attacked, and how dare he compare ISIS’s actions with those of the church.  That’s not Religism, that’s reality.