No idea if you've read it or not, but I just finished Robert Altemeyer's The Authoritarians from a link at Glenn Greenwald's blog.

He's the social psychologist that John Dean drew on for the research in "Conservatives Without Conscience," and there's a whole chapter devoted to religious conservatism (Chapter 4). One of the main points he makes is that there really is huge reason to doubt the sincerity of these attacks; as he explores the connection between religious faith and authoritarian personalities, he finds that something like 60% of self-identified Christian fundamentalists hadn't actually read more than a few chapters of the Bible and most of their understanding of it came from second-hand sources, i.e. whatever their preacher's telling them on Sunday morning.

There's a chapter (number 5) about the leaders themselves from Altemeyer's reasearch, the leaders of the right-wing religious movements tend to have very loosely held beliefs. They're primarily a route to power and a means of controlling their followers when they get there, with the added bonus of being a very powerful hammer for smashing opposition.

Donohue is an especially nasty example. Amanda's coarse language sends him to a swoon, but he clearly has no problem with tenure-track professors date-raping their students.

The bottom line is that people like Donohue, Dobson, Robertson, Perkins, etc. simply aren't honest. However, they're hiding so completely behind their churches that it's impossible to separate criticism of the demagogues from the criticism of the church because the demagogues have gone to such great lengths to make them indistinguishable. This doesn't mean they shouldn't be attacked, however. The real question is how to attack them most effectively; even calling them on their own constant hypocrisy has next to no effect on their credibility with their followers, as Altemeyer documents quite effectively.

Amanda,
lets face it, ALL religions have offensive beliefs. The extent to which they are more or less offensive is dependent only on the extent to which they are 'religious,' e.g. Unitarians are essentially non-religious. Fundamentalists, whatever their stripes, are:

A: By definition, total hypocrites
B: Control freaks
C: On some level, lunatics

They're nothing if not sincere. I give them that. Hitler was sincere too.

Having said that, you know what? I'm not crazy about abortion. My wife was an adopted baby in 1972. If she was born a year later there is a very good chance she would have been aborted. I also think America could use a heroic megadose of the chemotherapy of Confucianism and Muslim modesty.

The most basic tenets of 'faiths' are actually essential to reason: The powerful don't get to make up rules as they go along; there are established rules - they are written down. Most importantly, there is a 'truth' higher than that of powerful men's opinions and interests.

I think your status as a living emblem of the suppression of free speech grants you a license to, on some level, hate the haters. You've just taken a roller coaster ride on the bizarre never-never land of the U.S. press. You have a great point: Halos must not be made into force fields that protect religions and their believers when they deign to weigh in on politics. I think atheism has world historical facts on its side - the entire sorry history of religious conflict for one.

Yet something else is also true: Our culture is as profane as POSSIBLE. Civility isn't just a means to an end, it's an end in itself.

I don't think atheism's agenda is well served by profanity, and to the extent that civility itself is wounded, you're just tapping into the same profane vein as the Limbaughs, Savages and O'Reilly's of the world. It wasn't the note you were singing, it was the timber.

You are in tiny minority of people whose words have been held up for national scrutiny. You have been 'crucified' for simply being candid. Bill Mahr's 9-11 comments come to mind.

Here's hoping this chastening, however unfair, will mellow you into a fine wine, instead of making you bitter vinegar.

60% is amazingly high, but I believe it. I'm often told by people that I just need to read the Bible, and I get the impression that they haven't read it. I've read it cover to cover twice and have a copy that's falling apart from use.

Other than that, I'm with you, except on the weird abortion thing. I'm not really convinced by the argument that I should be forced to bear a child so some hypothetical dude can have a wife sometime in the future. ;)

There's a reason why the Church back in the Middle Ages was so very strongly against making the Bible available in 'vulgar' languages (ie. languages that people actually understood). Reading the good book from cover to cover and still taking it seriously is quite difficult, given the number of contradictions inherent in it.

Dear Amanda,
In your previous post you ask the question "How did the national discourse become so degraded?" It occurs to me that our national discourse on religion is a lot like our national discourse in general, where the powers that be spend most of their media energy preventing a sincere dialogue. Rather, they take sensationalist hot points, boil them down into dividing-line sound bites and then assume a posture that puts them on the right side of whatever group they're pandering to. They spew out the sound bites like cluster bombs. The entire enterprise is intended to squelch discourse.

The fact that someone who fervently believes in the virgin birth of Jesus or in flying spaghetti monsters, or as Dick Cheney believes, "We're having some incredible successes in Iraq," can't be called to account for their beliefs makes the entire enterprise of "discourse" almost impossible. These days so many of our media products are about aligning and reinforcing faith-based ideas, whether it's economics, the Bill Clinton/Tom Friedman types urging us to swallow the free market/free trade mythology; militarism and international relations, where the "war on terror" trumps any rational discourse and the landscape is littered with soundbite cluster bombs like "support the troops" "Islamofascism" or "war"; even what to do about global warming is now overwhelmed in the media with the foolish belief that ethanol will somehow make a significant contribution to resolving the problem. Here we are, six months into the new media (and politicall) acknowledgement that perhaps global warming is an issue worth talking about, and now mainstream discourse is all about building belief in ethanol as our salvation from global warming (and dependence on foreign oil).

I think it's the architecture of our discourse that is flawed. The national discourse has become a gladiator's arena where combatants bash each other over the head with their infallible beliefs, and whoever still has the microphone/TV camera still pointed at them at the end of the match wins. The national discourse now functions to strengthen our faith in faith itself because to question the beliefs that underlie our faith is too frightening. And those who are most threatened by such questioning are those whose beliefs are the most detached from mundane quotidian reality, like the Flying Spaghetti Monsterians.

How would we, or you, know why Edwards said he was offended?

How about this: You tell us why you are offended, without using Edwards or Joe Average as a proxy.

Stuff gets said in context. Amanda was writing not for Joe Average, but for a self-selected group of people who would recognize satirical content for what it was. Also, the context itself makes clear that she is talking about the hypocrisy that runs deep in these matters.

If she had said the same thing at her great aunt's annual dinner party it would have been inappropriate. Likewise, if Dick Cheney told Amanda's great aunt to fuck off, as he told the ranking Democratic member of Senate judiciary, that would have been inappropriate. I'm sure there are things you have said or written that would not be appropriate commentary for a staffer on a presidential campaign. I don't think you would expect to be fired for things you'd said in the past.

Even worse, there's a double standard. Hynes is still dissing mormons while he works for McCain. Where's your outrage now?

People are sidestepping your questions because arguing with people who blatantly exhibit bad faith is boring.

I'm not an American (merely lived in the US for six years, but that was in California, so not sure that counts), but from what little I know about American history, the national discourse has not always been this flawed, has it?

And if it hasn't, when did that change? Did it have anything to do with the advent of television - the great enabler of "discourse" for morons by morons (nothing specifically American, mind you!)?

By the way, you are painting a pretty depressing picture. If the national discourse is as screwed up as you say (from what I've seen, I have little reason to doubt that), it's going to end in disaster. If a nation gives up on rational debate and intelligent analysis, it's going to collide head-on with cold hard reality sooner or later.

I think thrashing about calling Catholics and other pro-life people misogynistic diminishes the entire issue.

First, you're misquoting Amanda. She does not call Catholics misogynist, nor does she call Catholics pro-life, FTM. Her criticism is of the Church's official teaching, and of people who advocate those teachings lying to women about the safety and efficacy of contraception. In fact, most American Catholics disagree with the Church's teaching on contraception, and they put their condom....(no never mind. If I put up a joke I'll be trivialize this or something. But American Catholics do, clearly, practice contraception in large numbers.)

Second, it's very clear that the pro-life position is not about abortion. If pro-life people were sincerely concerned about immoral people killing innocent blastocysts, there would condoms in every pew, and every service would be followed with an educational program on how to avoid pregnancy.

They are not against abortion. Abortion is the icky issue they hold up to the public, but what there are really against is women controlling their own reproductive lives. Hence, idiotic programs like abstinence only sex education, opposition to a vaccine that prevents cervical cancer, opposition to plan B contraceptions, support for pharmacists who do not follow doctors' orders and on and on.

They are not against abortion. They are against women having sex outside of [Christian] marriage and against women deciding when and whether they will have a child.

Is that misogynist? Seems close enough to me.

It took me a while to reply to this, because convulsive laughter makes typing hard.

OK, on a lot of things, David Brooks agrees with Rush Limbaugh - yet Brooks holds up Limbaugh for scorn. Why? Limbaugh has no class.

I could have a conversation with Brooks, but with Limbaugh, it'd be so hard to resist the overwhelming urge for homicide, it would be the better part of valor to forget the whole thing.

For some reason, threatening atheists with hellfire is rarely effective.

You're right, but wrong. Yes, literacy rates were laughably low and most educated people understood Latin. But no, that wasn't the point - the point was that the unwashed masses couldn't even hear what the Bible said in their mother tongue.

Translations are tricky... but if the core message of the Bible was so hard to translate, it wouldn't be worth listening to anyway. Besides, wouldn't the translators receive divine guidance?

I guess I wasn't clear enough.  My comments weren't about the positions you take per se.  My comments were directed at your critics who say anybody who questions or criticizes organized religions must be somekind of God hating Atheist...

I'd like to suggest reading the three popular religious critics of the moment: Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins.

All three make a point of challenging the idea that one has to tiptoe around people's religious sensibilities. Harris in particular has been opposing this idea. A visit to is web site at samharris.org will provide links to a few recent editorials on the issue.

I think it is true then when religion itself is under attack the differences between sects are set aside to combat the larger enemy of Enlightenment thought. Religion is all about social control and extracting funds from people. Who wants to give up a gig like that?

--- Policies not Politics
Daily Landscape

So then the issue is ultimately about power. Why are church leaders so frightened of women?

Does the same argument extend to fundamentalists in other churches?

Ron Byers

(Apologies in advance for the wordiness of this post)

Your points are fair that the beliefs are and ought to be subject to debate. That's what it means to have differing views.

But there is a space where people simply cannot debate or even really examine their beliefs. At risk of of simplifying or misrepresenting your beliefs, you believe in a bedrock way, that denying women the right to choose whether or not to have a child is wrong in a fundamental human rights kind of way. Not negotiable, no ifs ands or buts; a firmament of sorts. If I were opposed to abortion being legal I could debate you all I like, but to change that set of beliefs would really involve changing your worldview rather than you conceding particular points. But there are boundaries to that firmament - not everything is non-negotiable or outright wrong. For most religious people, religion itself helps define those boundaries.

The wrongness of some things is so clear to everyone (murder is wrong, random imprisonment is wrong, etc.) that there's little debate about how the law ought to work. But the wrongness of other things is a lot less clear, so within society can either debate those things amongst ourselves, try to assume power to force our view, or pretend there are no differences.

The boundaries of right and wrong are what is not being adequately respected, and at issue here. I would say liberals subscribe by and large (and practice somewhat less) a view of tolerance - we can agree on some wrongs that need to be addressed, and for the others we just figure out how to compromise and/or live with the things others are doing that we think are wrong. In a word, pluralism. Liberals sometime mistake this for secularism, and that's a mistake. Reaching this compromise does not require separating debate from faith, but rather finding the ways one's faith can coexist with the conflicting elements of the faith of others

That's how I read Ed's comments, and it tends to be what I think about. You apparently believe in a much more black and white view of sexism than many others do, which puts you at odds with those who either don't thing it's a wrong, or put it within the sphere of "debatably wrong" or "it's complex".

That's your right of course, but to move from there to saying that the Catholic church's teachings are anti-human rights because they fail to acknowledge sexism as the black-and-white wrong you see it to be is a strong charge. I would hate to say it's out of bounds, because that's just stifling, but it's hard to see how that will work in a pluralist framework. Catholics attach a lot of value beyond the literal to the teachings of the Catholic church, so to suggest that their teachings are ingrained with a deep wrong doesn't open much room for public debate, and can well offend people. The title of this post, for example, appears to frame things that way by leading with "[wrongheaded - sic] religions with offensive beliefs". That's approximately where I have to check out - I don't think that framing of the debate is productive, no matter how many other equivalences exist, and it basically moots the other good arguments you're making.

Agreed. I have zero moral qualms about abortion or contraception. Most people feel abortion is immoral for the reason they feel that women sleeping around is immoral---they are products of a culture that has irrational sex phobia, especially towards women, and they've absorbed it. Most people I know who strive to get past the "sex is dirty and should be saved for someone you love" think to actually think about the issues conclude that there's no secular, rational reason to assign an embryo a moral status, especially not one that erodes a woman's basic rights to privacy and self-determination.

The stats are abysmal:

* About 92 percent of American own at least one copy of the Bible. * The average household has 3 copies. * About 67 percent of Americans say that the Bible holds the answers to the basic questions of life. * The Bible is the world's all-time best seller. * At least 20 million copies are sold each year. * Gideon International annually distributes more than 45 million copies.

Biblical knowledge (Biblical illiteracy is rampant):

* Perhaps 15 percent of Americans participate in Bible studies.
* The number of people who read the Bible, at least occasionally is 59 percent.
* Less than 50 percent of Americans can name the first book of the Bible (Genesis).
* Only 1/3 of Americans know who delivered the Sermon on the Mount (more people identified Billy Graham rather than Jesus).
* Twenty-five percent of Americans don't know what is celebrated on Easter (the Resurrection of Christ, the foundational event of Christianity).
* Twelve percent of Christians think that Noah's wife is Joan of Arc.
* Eighty percent of born-again Christians (including George W. Bush) think it is the Bible that says "God helps them that help themselves." (Actually it was said by Benjamin Franklin.)

I have an extremely catholic close friend who hasn't read any of the bible near as I can tell. Like you I have read a lot of it more than once (was an english major and you aren't truly literate if you haven't read KJV) and I manage to astonish him pretty regularly by telling him what the bible actually says.

For me, and most pro-choice people I know, abortion is morally and ethically wrong. That decision is not necessarily based on religious faith. ronbyers

Very well. Without reference to religious faith would you kindly make the argument that the abortion of a hundred or so barely differentiated human cells is "morally and ethically wrong."

Good luck!

I dunno, I think it' a lot more disrespectful to call a belief "wrongheaded" than "offensive". "Wrongheaded" seems to me like you're saying that someone who believes in the rightness of sexism is just too stupid to see that it's wrong. I don't think people who promote sexist dogma are wrongheaded; I think they have some powerful motivations to oppress women that I give respect to.

But otherwise, I agree there are fundamental differences of belief at stake. In this particular issue, you put your finger on the fact that one side really does believe women are equal and the other side thinks we were made by god in order to serve men. I prefer these differences to be out in the open and let people mull over the evidence and decide. I got this bizarre impression from the whole Donohue dust-up that the reason that he had in his files my post about the anti-contraception materials the Catholic church is passing out is that the post revealed information that some socially conservative Catholics would rather keep on the down low. I disapprove strongly of that. If you think people should shun contraception, just say so. If you're not saying so, it's probably because you know people aren't buying that argument.

Amanda:

This 'sex phobia' idea is pretty swingin' '70's.

There are very good reasons not to sleep around - bastard babies and AIDS being two very good ones. King Herrod was said to have all manner of God awful things crawling around down there, but the moral utility of chastity wasn't repealed in 1970.
In modern day Africa there is a clear link between a culture where male promiscuity is accepted and women are afflicted with AIDS. We know that, because of the mechanics of it all, women are more likely to get AIDS than heterosexual men.

So?

And imo a pretty damned good hunch, lol...

O'Reilly and slandered?  Why do those 2 words just seem like they go perfectly together?  I am surprised he didn't try to say you were the Antichrist.  But I didn't catch his show...I don't watch Faux News I would hate to have to replace my TV, lol.

My apologies again Amanda if in my hasty rant I gave anyone the impression that the "God hating Atheist" thing was a position you took... 

A little from column A and a little from column B, I think. On a certain level, religions (as well as society in general, obviously) depend on a certain amount of human reproduction simply to continue existence. So encouraging people to have as many children as possible as early as possible makes a great deal of sense, especially when you factor in extremely high child mortality rates and the harsh living conditions of a few millenia B.C.E. Polygamy also makes perfect sense in the context of a civilization that's hanging by its fingernails off the proverbial cliff in terms of survival; a man can impregnate multiple women, but a woman can only carry one man's child at a time, so it's easy to understand how this would develop over time (and not polyandry, for example) if you're just trying to get lots of children to adulthood. Point being - crackpot theories on the origins of polygamy aside - it's not difficult to imagine a lot of the older edicts being to some extent necessary if you're just trying to keep from being wiped off the face of the earth, whether by disease and famine or hostile neighbors. The birth rate must exceed the death rate, one way or another.

Power, I think, comes in stronger later (probably because it could never have been challenged anyway), and it seems worth noting that modern extremists are only interested in the oldest traditions which are most restrictive to women. I think a large part of it really is general misogyny, but also part of it is simply trying to limit the number of people with access to power to as few as possible. Eliminate women from power and *BAM* you've got about 50% less competition to deal with. Plus you've got a nice, docile woman with nothing to do but raise your future dynasty. Foucault's History of Sexuality would be well worth bringing up at this point, but I'm afraid I just don't have the tools to do it justice in a blog post. Maybe someone much smarter than I could pick it up and run with it.

Anyway, Amanda herself is an excellent example of exactly why they feel the way they do. If only she'd been good girl, gotten married, and squeezed out a few pups by the age of twenty-five, we wouldn't have any of this unpleasantness, would we? But thankfully, she didn't, and she is who she is.

I totally agree with you that many of the anti-choice, anti contraception, pro abstinence activists seem to be about punishing women. Pregnency and even disease seem to be offered as resonable punishment for deviate sexual behavior.

Having said that you make it a bit to simplistic. If one sees the fetus as a person then what is in the best interest of the mother is no longer the priority. It is why Roe was such a sloppy opinion. It makes exactly that sort of balance. I presume that you believe that if a woman gives birth of a child she is not entitled to murder it because it forces her into motherhood?

Blackmun did not write a great opinion but at least he saw the issue as a lot more complicated than activists on either side.

Daniel A. Greenbaum

What harm?

Abortions do permanent damage to the uterus. They increase the chances of cancer and infection, and can make child bearing difficult or impossible once the woman chooses pregnancy later on. I could easily argue that abortion is a crime against not just life, but women as well.

No evidence on the cancer claim, although it's a classic lie among anti-choicers, and legal abortion by a trained professional before week sixteen is clearly safer than full-term pregnancy. In fact, up until the last weeks, abortion's usually considered safer than pregnancy simply because late-pregnancy complications brought on by the sheer physical strain, like eclampsia, aren't a factor. The only way abortion can be broadly defined as a "crime against women" is when womanhood is defined very narrowly indeed, and primarily by a sentimentalized view of reproductive functions.

I'd like to note that this thread neatly proves my assertion that "faith" is a cover for misogynist desire to control women. The post is about faith and quickly devolved into a bunch of men ranting about why women like me don't deserve to control something as fundamental as whether our bodies are used to create new humans.

The biggest problem with religion is not the obvious and inherent falsity of religious belief, but rather that it is a system that teaches people how to believe things that are not true. Once you learn how to believe religious lies and fantasies, you can believe anything, and that is the real underpinning of the support for the Bush administration.

Sincere belief in something that is both false and stupid does not merit respect. In modern American culture stupidity is highly valued and sincerity is a virtue. However, a healthy democracy requires intelligent and informed decision making. Bad decisions made by sincere bozos are no better than bad decisions made by cynical bozos. In fact, they are probably worse since they come with the intoxicating delusion of moral righteousness. In a healthy society all forms of stupidity must be mocked and insulted relentlessly.

I can understand why you are a lightning rod. You have taken the conversation and simply twisted it to something it isn't.

I have yet to read any man or woman posting in this thread make any claim that "women like" you "don't deserve to control something as fundamental as whether" your "bodies can be used to create new humans." Show me where anybody, man or woman, on this thread has made that argment.

Ron Byers

I see the biggest problem with religion is their insistence that fear is the great motivator of human beings, that without the threat of punishment, people are incapable of "good" behavior.

My jaw dropped when I came to this quote from Bill Donohue: "all candidates must show proof of being immaculately conceived, that is, they must demonstrate that they were conceived without sin.”

Supposedly he's aghast when a feminist makes a sarcastic crack about Catholic dogma... but he's just fine with doing the same thing, in the course of defending a sexual predator. What a complete and utter hypocrite he is.

I'm not sure I follow. If you think getting an abortion is wrong or morally suspect, what do you think will happen to a pregnant woman who wants to have an abortion but feels that it's wrong to do so? I suspect, strongly, she will have a baby against her will.

And while you aren't advocating the idea that your discomfort with women choosing not to have babies if they get pregnant on accident should be turned into law, the argument that abortion is immoral is in fact, last I checked, the backbone of the argument that it should be banned.

As for the "women like me" thing, I like to remind people what we all too often forget, which is that reproductive justice isn't an airy philosophical argument but a reality of women's lives. If reproductive rights were yanked, this would have a dramatic and horrible effect on, well, me, amongst millions of women. I don't buy into the idea that there's something unseemly about keeping those who can get pregnant at the center of any debate about the laws pertaining to pregnancy.

Of course another major reason why it was kept in an archaic language that so few could read was that dissemination of information could be controlled by the church. If the local bishop spoke with the authority of "God's word" who was to second guess him, or question him or doubt his motivation? Religion is nothing more than organized resignation to the powers that be.
Everything is God's will, no one is responsible, and it is better to accept the condition of humans than try to improve it.

So, it's not like we're going to organize to form our own country.

Beautiful day in Austin today, eh?

Dude, have at it. You start the movement. Send me an email when you have the land and the resources to defend it.

That's just it. Sometimes people's deeply held belief do offend you or me or someone else, but to broadly label them offensive doesn't work at all.

There are an awful lot of people who, for better or for worse, have a lot less clarity about the issue of sexism that you do - except that it doesn't enter their "sphere of irreparably wrong" enough to drive them away from the Catholic church altogether. But that's not to say they necessarily endorse sexism or believe that God created women to serve men. Particularly since what they draw from the Catholic church and practice personally is often a lot more about tradition and continuity with the past and with community than with particularly noxious dogmatic stances.

I don't happen to agree with a lot of the church's position on contraception and abortion. But I'd be hard pressed to want a debate with my more conservative Catholic friends over whether they really truly think women should serve men, because it'll end up in a fight over absolutes where nobody changes their opinion. Most people I've met just don't view the subject in that high-stakes a light, and if what we as liberals want is to encourage pluralism, then perhaps we ought not try take up the debate in that fashion. Doubly so if we're hoping to engage them on issues I also care about and where we do agree: opposition to the death penalty and war, justice and help for the poor, etc.

Her enemies are bad christians. They lack any sense of responsiblity to humans or faith in humans. Their resolute insistence that the "kingdom of god" is other worldly, is an inherently selfish view that permits, excuses and rationalizes the fact that people, not god are responsible for the dismal living conditions most people in the world find themselves in. Their christianity teaches people nothing but resignation and acceptance of evil, that our salvation lies not in good works, interdependence and improving life conditions for all, but the individual salvation of the soul for which the acknowledgement of Jesus Christ as divine is the only requirement. They teach intolerance, a two millenium old contempt for women, fear of punishment as the only motivator of humanity and a selfishness of spirit that is as cruel as it is inhumane.

Any medical procedure can result in complications. Childbirth can result in complications - you're not against childbirth are you?

But the threat to your liberties and mine is ultimately political, not religious (in this country at least), and political persuasion requires accepting for the sake of argument that people you violently disagree with are not necessarily acting in bad (if you will excuse the expression) faith.

Ed...

I know you post was directed at Amanda but I have to disagree.  The threats to my (and everyone's) liberties and freedoms in this country are not just political but also religious in nature.  And just because the forces of organized religion are trying to impose their beliefs through the political system it doesn't make the threat a purely political one.  They are people of faith acting in bad faith when they try to undermine the principle of separation of church and State which our republic was supposed to operate under.  And not wanting to "offend" them is in a sense saying their belief that it is their religious duty to spread their faith through government is legitimate...when it isn't.

See now this is a perfect illustration of my point:

If atheist believers are not offended by religious believers why do atheists speak about the beliefs of others with such derision? To quote Amanda, "We no more hate god or the gods than we hate unicorns."

There is no intended derision here. As I said above, if you plug in wicca, the hindu pantheon, Hopi animism, Dinka animism and Islam, you still end up the same result. It's not that we're derisive. There is no supernatural--and I don't see why we have to view one set of supernatural beliefs as special.

For her they are all mythical creatures and the poor boobs who believe in them are just the ignorant unwashed. If they would only open their eyes those poor religious people would be enlightened atheists.

No, that's what you're jamming in there. Nobody is saying that. She does not ever, once, say that you should be enlightened like atheists or call you a boob. She just says she doesn't believe in the supernatural. There's no more content to it than that. The problem is with you. It doesn't bother you, I imagine, that a Muslim believes you to be a blasphemer because you believe in the divinity of Christ (if you do, that is). Why should it bother you if I also don't think that the divinity of Christ makes any sense?

Really, imo, what's going on here is cognitive dissonance. We live in a technological society which operates with the antithesis of the supernatural as its driving force. It's hard to square that with supernatural explanations of events, even distant events. So when people point out that the similarity of all supernatural events are that they cannot be observed, and therefore are at best, superfluous, to be dismissed by Occam's Razor, it creates conflict. You interpret that conflict you're feeling as something that we're saying. But it isn't.

Sorry to tell you this Jay, but atheism is just another belief system, and just like all the others, its practitioners feel smuggly superior to non-believers.

No, it is not. It is not a belief system. It always weirds me out when believers make this argument, because at other times they insist we're godless heathens who are going to burn in hell.

Atheism is the rejection of the supernatural as an explanation for natural phenomena. Atheists claim that everything that exists in the world can be explained by natural processes. There's no faith involved there. No belief. That's why you'll so commonly see the unicorn/God parallel--because both entities are beyond nature, and are equivalent.

There's no smugness at all here. Again, that's just projection.

Frankly, I find atheists to be among the most offended by the errant beliefs of those poor fools who take "the opiate of the masses."

And here's this other thing you just won't accept. I'm not offended by your belief. It didn't bother me when I was living in a 15 household African village that one of the heads of households had spiritual power over sorghum-eating birds. I take my shoes off in a mosque and cover my head in a synagogue. Not a smidgen of offense. It doesn't bother me in the least that someone goes to mass or doesn't.

Actually catholic teaching is less hypocritical than evangelical christian positions. I don't know about your parish (which is, again, part of the earlier point that nobody is talking about "catholics", but the official vatican line), but the official teaching is anti-war, anti-abortion, anti-death penalty and anti-euthanasia.

That strikes me as a good thing, logically speaking anyway.

but I also think that you can be against abortion and..

1. Be a woman.
2. Not be an evil, evil, evil man.

The point, of course, is that it's one thing to be against abortions, and another entirely to be against abortions for other people. MOreover, the even broader point is that the people who want to prevent other people from having abortions also tend to want to prevent other people from using birth control and learning about human reproduction.

"Try to offend an atheist or an agnostic - it's really hard or impossible."

You must be pretty quiet and inoffensive. My experience tells me that any true believer (someone who has been tribalized on a particular subject, whether it be religion, politics, gender roles, etc.) will, when one of their core (and often unexamined) axioms is questioned even indirectly, take real, personal, and bitter offense.

The "in your face" element drives traffic, which is what it's all about.

You see the same thing on television, things become more course every year.

Oh bullshit. When hasn't human civilization been "in your face", vulgar, over the top, crude and coarse? Culture is always a mix of the sacred and profane. Who would want it any other way?

I think there are much worse things about religion. People don't examine religion carefully and objectively. They see religions as pious belief systems that you may not agree with but should respect because the beliefs are sincerely held by good-hearted souls.

People are not souls. They are organisms, and as such their primary functions are to process nutrients into excrement and to survive until they can reproduce. The remarkable thing is that these organisms have developed a very useful organ for processing sensory information and controlling muscle action--the brain. With discipline, i.e. the development of useful behavior patterns, and education, i.e. the capability to acquire, organize and store information, the organism we call a person can become human. In essence a human is a person who is capable of making intelligent and informed decisions using verifiable data and who can function as a productive member of a culture that values intelligence and learning.

Religion exists because of deficiencies in the child's mental development process that form as the infant tries to come to terms with its surroundings. The four pillars of religious belief are "the parent god," "us against them," "tell other people what to do" and the primacy of mental constructs over the "real," sensory world. These traits are found across the range of religious beliefs and can be very harmful. "Tell other people what to do" is just the child's way of internalizing the control behaviors that its parents used during its upbringing. It is the source of all forms of moral filth and actions designed to control the behavior of others. Anti-gay legislation is an obvious product, but an even more harmful one is drug laws. "Us against them" springs from the child's effort to differentiate itself, its immediate group and the outside world. It is an essential survival behavior, but it also energizes the essence of religious lunacy, the distinction between the saved and the damned. War is a natural byproduct of this behavior pattern. "God the parent" is the product of the child's initial conceptualization of its relationship to its parents. The religious god is not just a supernatural being, it is also a parent, and that is the basic mindset that underlies authoritarianism. The distinction between mental images and sensory data is an epistomological problem that challenges every infant. Many never crack it. For them, what they want to be true generally takes precedents over what their senses report. It forms the essence of religious belief, but it is not simply a condition. It is a pattern of behavior that can be strengthened and reinforced by repetitious use. Once mastered, this behavior enables all sorts of truly harmful lunacy such as the pre-Iraq war "intelligence."

Did he suggest anyone should be forced to have a baby? No, he said only that he is not crazy about abortion, and even if we accept that he opposes it, your spring-loaded reaction to his words does not alter their meaning. If you doubt that proposition, then I'll ask you: "Does your response mean that you are crazy about abortion?"

Ed,

I really have one, very simple question I'd love an answer to:

Do you believe that Donohue was making an honest complaint about a perceived offense to his faith?

I posted this link above, but I'll post it again. Donohue argued that a tenure-track professor at Fordham University, who was also the editor of Crisis magazine, and who date-raped one of his students in his office after a pre-Lenten party, should not have been fired from his job at the university.

In response to the uproar over the firing of Dean Hudson, the same William Donohue that demanded Amanda and Melissa be fired from Edwards' campaign for bad language excused Mr. Hudson from date-raping a student in his office by saying this:

In a press release, Bill Donahue, president of the Catholic League, minimized the charges against Hudson and attempted a joke at the Virgin Mary’s expense. “Effective today,” Donohue wrote, his organization had “a new requirement for all future employees: all candidates must show proof of being immaculately conceived, that is, they must demonstrate that they were conceived without sin.”

To re-iterate: Donohue thinks that a woman making a joke about the "hot, sticky, Holy Spirit" is worse than a university professor date-raping an 18 year-old student. He claims offense about a joke at the Virgin Mary's expense when just three years ago he made a joke about her himself. And he's treated as an honest, principled man.

Do you think it's possible to defuse a man like that, who genuinely wants to destroy you, without sacrificing every single thing you stand for?

Above link to Carpetbagger article about Donohue doesn't work. Here's another try.

It is only irrelevant if you don't accept that a fetus is a living being and especially a human being. If you see it as living then there is much less difference between infanticide and abortion. This is a point that Roe makes. That is why abortions can be controlled if not eliminated in the third trimester. Roe makes clear that a woman's right to control her body ends when she gets pregnant and the first trimester passes.

It is the failure to acknowledge to complications of this issue by either side that made any sort of resolution so difficult.

Daniel A. Greenbaum

You know, what I find offensive about Kilgore's post is his view that only christians can criticize christians. It doesn't even make sense. It's the equivelant of claiming that only doctors can criticize doctors or only politicians can criticize politicians. It's condescending and silly. "Whoa there little lady, leave that problem to us big, strong christians."

Just tell me one thing KingElvis...

Where in the 1st amendment is there a clause about "taste"?  To me the beauty of it is free speech is about choice.  You have the choice to be as coarse or pious as you would like to...if you don't like what you see on TV change the channel.  I often do.  But I see nothing "American" in limiting speech based on not offending a person or group of people's "sensibilities".  One person's trash is another's treasure.  Who are you or anybody to say what I should or shouldn't be able to see?

And while I won't argue that you find porn imagery offensive I will not agree with your premise that on it's merits, or lack thereof, that porn imagery is offensive to all people.

I fully agree with you Bev...

Part of the reason, imo, that this planet is as FUBAR as it is, is because of those "big, strong christians" trying to take care of all the perceived "problems".  It is condensending and offensive that unless you have accepted Jesus as your "Lord and Savior" that a person doesn't have sufficient standing to be included in the discourse...

I have no interest in defending the likes of Dohohue, who offends me for all the reasons he offends all progressives, but with the extra offense of pretending to speak for Christians.

I'm not sure what you mean by "defusing" Donohue, but if you mean that literally, the best way to defuse him is to deny the only credential that distinguishes him from every other right-wing operative: his claim to speak for Catholics.

And it's Catholics, and other Christians, who have that responsibility.

religion is entirely about the supernatural. That's the nature of religion.

This notion that one can't prove a negative is silly. I can make the same assertion about any supernatural entity--you can't prove there's no flying spaghetti monster, you can't prove there are no unicorns, and so forth.

Atheists make a simple claim--that the supernatural is superfluous. There's no "belief" required. Either something exists in the natural world, or it doesn't exist. That's not a statement of faith or lack of faith. It's a description of reality.

From a pragmatic standpoint, a God whose existence cannot be proven might as well not exist, and wasting time on Him/Her/It is pointless.

You mean I'm not allowed to notice that he claims to speak for all Catholics when he clearly does not? I'm not permitted to comment because I'm not Catholic? When Kerry was being threatened with denial of Communion, I'm supposed to sit in a corner and hope the other Catholics speak out?

OK, someone's talking about ejaculate in Mary's vagina, and they expect no one to be offended? Please.

The comment was INTENDED to offend, and offend it did.

The whole idea of the liberal counter attack was that the outrage was 'fake.'

Even if you are permitted, you wouldn't be effectual. If you stand up and point out that Catholics don't believe what Donahue says, but no actual Catholics do, then who will believe you and how have you advanced the debate?

.> Atheist? Praise religion, mention hell as their
> destination,

Doesn't bother most atheists I know. Perhaps people who are just using atheism as an excuse for arguing? But that begs the question a bit.

.> and especially, attempt to use religious
> principles in government

You do not consider that a problem that is fair to discuss? Plenty of very religious groups DID consider it a problem around, oh, 1790, which is why they signed on to the Constituation and the separation of church and state as their best guarantee of religious freedom. Sorta why the USofA was founded, if the legend we teach our children in grade school is to be believed.

sPh

I love it when people are infatuated with their own intelligence.

I thought you were the one equating American 'in your face' culture with "human civilization." It would be parochial of you to do that.

I stand corrected.

Good Gravy!

"Andrew summed up a discussion that's been raging for the past few days over Mitt Romney stating that people who don't have a faith shouldn't hold office. He didn't say that we should be barred from holding office, just that we shouldn't hold office.""

Strawman.

romney:
"We need to have a person of faith lead the country."

So romney does not state: "that people who don't have a faith shouldn't hold office." That's your strawman. Then you go on to tell us why he is a bigot based on your strawman. Smarter monkeys please.

Thanks for the high-school constitutional history lecture, but what did that have to do with my post, which was in reply to "How do you get atheists pissed off?"

Where you derive from my post that I think religious principles should be used in government, or, alternatively, that I don't think the idea is fair to discuss, I don't know. Do you?

To the extent that religion governs the formulation and execution of public policy, it is politics. And to the extent that religion is politics, it is fair to criticize it in the same manner, and to the same extent, as any other political motivation or theory. One of the chief problems in our discourse is that some religious leaders want to lob political bombs and then to shelter behind their faiths as the return fire arrives. This is not only an illegitimate rhetorical practice that undermines public discourse, but also a source of some of the very resentment that certain religious leaders make an industry out of deploring.

I seem to recall something from the Bible about "specks," "logs," and "eyes."

Fair enough. I agree with you on the whole ‘feelings’ thing. Even though I’m an atheist I really like the biblical line about be their fruits you shall know them. If someone works to increase repression I will oppose them. If someone works to increase freedom I will support them. For all those gray areas in-between where various interests have to be balanced, let’s talk.

Natasha Yar-Routh

Well, there should especially be so when the moral arguments against something are all based in revelation and have no secular argument behind them. But at this point in time, I see no point in muddying the waters with religions-and-sexphobic moral discomfort with abortion if you're pro-choice, especially since the anti-choice side wants to conflate some people's definition of immorality with illegality.

If you want to talk morals, though, I will happily posit that not only do I think there's no moral dilemma in abortion, I think that the vast majority of abortions were fundamentally the most moral choice for that woman. I think it's by far more moral to time your births for when you want them than not. And I'm sick of the moral good that is abortion being treated as a necessary evil.

I never said that a woman who freely chooses to have a baby is coerced. That makes no sense. However, I question how free a choice is when it's made under the threat of social ostracism or hellfire if you don't do as you're told.

I guess the non-believers can have Austin. We'd be like the Vatican reversed---an oasis of freethinking in the midst of a theocracy.

Agreed, but at no point did I ever say that people who hold beliefs I find offensive are de facto offensive people. I criticize the belief that women were put here to serve men. A lot of people I know who believe that I think are great. A lot of people I know who believe that suffer mightily for it and because I like or even love them, I'm motivated to fight the belief and reduce the suffering to people that it causes.

But there's good reasons to impugn the motivations of people who use piety as a cover for their political agitation to strip me and all women of our basic rights.

Well, there are good reasons to impugn the motivations of people who use piety as a cover for discounting the value of statements and actions by the pious.

You know, my wife is strongly, vigorously anti-abortion -- as passionately as I am pro-choice. There are deep, personal reasons for her beliefs. I'll wager that next to none of you, from Ms. Marcotte on down, ever considered the impact that real life might have on the motivations of those who are against abortion. You just demonize them ... hey, the way some Christians demonize you! Concept! "Oh, you're just a rightwing Christofascist nutjob! Your ideas are all wrong and I don't give a damn why you believe what you believe."

Which is why I do not believe in Ms. Marcotte's coy libertarian pronouncements. I don't think she does give a damn about people on the other side of the fence.

So much easier to piss in a bottle and stick a cross in it, than actually think about what that means or why do it.

Thanks.

mp

If you have to ask what jazz is, you'll never know.
-- Louis Armstrong

Sorry, I didn't mean to misrepresent. I see your point, but raise you a complication. A politician trying to convince the whole electorate to vote his way is probably not well served by pointing out how anti-choice religious arguments are made in bad faith. But a feminist trying to expose the real agenda of the Christian right is.

Most anti-choice voters just haven't thought about it in any deep way and are wooed by the emotional baby-killing rhetoric. But the actual activist anti-choice movement is the dictionary definition of bad faith debators. The anti-choice groups put out a bunch of propaganda about baby-killing and then turn around and agitate for policies that they know very well will increase the abortion rate, which is to say they are also trying to ban contraception and ban sex education.

My long term experience tells me that exposing the bad faith arguments of activist anti-choicers is in fact extraordinarily effective in persuading people not already on our side. In fact, I would argue that one of the reasons that the Democrats have gotten so much behind this bill in Congress that's supposed to reduce the abortion rate by providing funding for contraception and sex education was they knew very well that the abortion opponents would block it and thereby expose their real agenda.

FWIW, this is very different from saying all of Christianity or Catholicism is bad. I'm specifically stating that opposition to contraception is rooted in a sexist view of what women's proper roles are. That's not really in dispute by any thinking people who are well aware that opposition to contraception is coupled firmly to a belief that women should be welcoming to every pregnancy as it's god's plan for them.

I disagree that having 50% of people who a view that is coupled with anyone-hate is any evidence that it has to be more than hate. Solid majorities of people happily hate all the time.

That is the wierdest thing I've heard in a long time. What the hell was he talking about? Do you have a link? It makes no sense.

Jan Knaus

Re: Of course another major reason why it was kept in an archaic language that so few could read was that dissemination of information could be controlled by the church

Oh good grief, this is patently silly! Few people could read, period, and if they could (as I stated plainly above) they most likely could read Latin. This is not much different from the situation that obtains in Africa today: most African languages are not written, therefore depending on the country French, English, Portuguese, and Arabic are used as the languages of communication and literacy. Not until the 1300s did European langauges begin to evolve a fixed and standard written form; before that the written (and spoken) forms of English, French, German, Italian, etc. varied enormously from place to place, and a Yorkshireman (for example) would be unlikely to understand a letter written in English by a Londoner. But if both were educated they could understand each other's Latin. I will agree that the Church kept up its insistence on Latin longer than it should have, but its original motives were not sinister, but were simple common sense.

By the way, why is preaching to the choir always trotted out as something you don't want to do? Preaching to the choir gets them energized. The right knows this and it has served them well.

As an atheist, I want you to know that I rated you a "5" although I disagreed with at least half of what you said. I rated you as I did because I believe you were writing what you really think, without talking points. I hope you will be as open-minded about the thoughts of those of us who don't feel the same.

As to your comments about civility; who has been less civil than the far-right christianistas who spew venom at all those who do not agree with them about birth control, sexual orientation differences (definitely not limited to atheists!), or even the origins of life on earth?

Some things I really would like you to re-look at is your statement about profanity and atheism. What do they have to do with one another? Do atheists cuss more than christians? I personally don't think so.

Jan Knaus

Oh stop it. The church has spent the last 2000 years trying to control information, especially scientific information. They suppressed gospels, writings, creeds and those who supported and promoted those creeds. Information is power, he who controls information controls power.

I have to say that this is a puzzling post, and not just because it rambles in many directions at once.  One of the defining aspects of contemporary liberalism is the cult of victimhood, especially with regard to race and gender.  The taking of offense has become so common that even the common sense distinction between genuine prejudice and good-natured joking is often lost.  There's hardly a politician or public figure out there who hasn't gotten into some sort of flap over remarks that someone or other objects to.

And yet how do we square this with the idea in this post that it should be OK to portray religious beliefs in a way that is offensive to believers?  We are to believe that it is OK to mock or offend Catholicism, but not OK to tell a joke that might rely on a negative stereotype of blacks.  What is the distinction here, because I'm missing it?

To me, the recent incident that threw this into stark relief was the Larry Summers affair at Harvard.  Feminists took offense at the mere whiff of a suggestion that there might be generalized innate differences between the sexes and that these differences might help explain, in the aggregate, why there are more men than women in top math and science faculty positions.  For this, he was hounded out of town and was roundly smeared as a misogynist pig. 

Now we are told that we should examine, in the spirit of truth and open debate, the more retrograde aspects of certain religions, and that religious people who might take offense should just suck it up. 

So the question then is: why should feminists be able to shut down the discussion on the role of gender in science aptitude, yet complain when religious conservatives do essentially the same thing when they defend their traditions by taking offense at the strict scrutiny of their beliefs?

As in so many areas of political debate, it always depends on whose ox is being gored. 

I am an atheist and I am constantly offended by the absurd "conventional wisdom" that our country was founded on judeo-christian beliefs. Our founders wanted to save us from religios zealotry. I am offended over and over again by the boobs who think that because George Bush claims to be a christian he is better than others; that he is honorable; that he should be respected.

Oh, yes. It is definitely possible to offend an atheist, but what is offensive to us (or at least to me) is dishonesty and fake morality. That is what I see every time I look at Haggart, George Bush, Pat Robertson, Dick Cheney, and all of those who claim christianity as a dodge against being held responsible for their actions. Do you HONESTLY believe they BELIEVE in HELL? I don't, because if they did, they would be on their knees, begging forgiveness. They are all hypocrites and liars.

Jan Knaus

Tell me about the supernatural in Buddhism. Maybe you don't acknowledge that Buddhism is a religion.

Ron Byers

Do you believe that Donohue was making an honest complaint about a perceived offense to his faith?

No.

This is another edition of Simple Answers to Simple Questions. (pace Atrios.)

He has an agenda and a hit list, not a grievance.

Crablaw Weekly

Athesits do not believe in god. If god shows up, we will say hello. We just don't believe. Atheism has nothing to do with infallibilty; it has to do with reality and proof.

Agnostics would also be happy to go with some proof; they just are just not ready to say they actually don't believe right now. They need to keep their fingers crossed behind their backs...just in case....as if the god of the old testament would give them a break if he actually existed.

This is the same guy who sent all the people in the world to hell who happened to be born in a place in the world where they never heard his "holy message." Yeah, right.

Jan Knaus

Try Wikipedia as a starting point; the article on abortion is lacking very few citations. While suctioning the uterus isn't fun, it's nothing compared to stretching it to an enormous size and expelling both a baby and a blood-rich placenta attached to its wall, never mind the various other strains that pregnancy puts on one's pelvic floor, cervix, ligaments, heart, lungs, kidneys, circulatory system, and skeleton. And that's assuming a vaginal delivery, not a surgical one, which really does tear the uterus up and make future labors riskier. You have a lot to learn about pregnancy & birth if you think that medical abortion in an appropriate environment is the more debilitating alternative.

I'm specifically stating that opposition to contraception is rooted in a sexist view of what women's proper roles are.

Absolutely, but I think you lose people, apparently including Ed, with the term "woman-hatred." ... "what?- I love women!" and all that. But as I see it, what you're actually saying-- and I totally agree with you-- is that professions of love or respect for a class of people that is totally contingent on their behaving in accord with rigid expectations is at its core worthless, so in that sense yes, it's hatred of women. But conditional regard is a fact of life, and most people are unwilling to examine the scripts they spend their lives trying to force others to perform, so the criticism sails right past them.

Maybe I'm just nitpicking, but while it's essential to keep reminding people that hostility based on unfair and overly narrow definitions of what a "good" woman should be is their problem, not that of the women they're deriding, references to a more general hatred of women only really seem to work as a dog whistle [g] for people like me.

I had a friend who felt the same way, although I always thought it was unconscionable of her mother (her mom kept her, made up a husband who was tragically killed, etc.) to ever let her think that the only thing that kept her from aborting was the illegality of it (actually, she hoped that the married bio dad would leave his wife for her, but that's another story). I know another young man whose mom also bore & kept him, after Roe, and he feels the same way, which to me seems stupidly egotistical: if his mom had wanted an abortion, she certainly could have chosen one. FTR, I also know some pre-Roe adoptees who are more matter of fact about their bio moms' choices, which is a much more sensible perspective, since we're all here due to some random & previously unpredictable sequence of events.

As half the blogosphere knows by now, I wasn't supposed to exist, because my parents' first pregnancy, the boy, was originally due mere days before I was conceived. But, placenta problems were and are the most common cause of death in utero, and my mom had to wait days for the induction because of abortion being illegal. Back then, they said "get pregnant again ASAP," which is how I materialized; now, of course, they usually counsel waiting a few months for physical & mental recovery, so I wouldn't have been conceived under more modern rules either. That's just life.

I might have mis-read the lead part of this. Were you working for the Edwards campaign, trying to get him elected to President of the United States of America? Against very clever adults? Did I miss something?

Maybe I'm wrong, because I like Edwards. Please tell me I'm wrong.

Jan Knaus

Re: They are against women having sex outside of [Christian] marriage and against women deciding when and whether they will have a child.

Presumably they are against men doing these things too, since men cannot have sex outside marriage unless women do too (unless its homosex and we all know how excized the Religious Right is about that!) And men use contraception (remmber condoms?) which the Roman Catholic opposes just as much as it does the Pill.
I have to say I am really turned off by a certain sort of narrow feminist rant that supposes women are always and everywhere victims and men never are. What a crock of bull!

I never realized there are so many Religions with offensive beliefs. I wish they were all perfect like mine.

Where is a good Dutch cartoonist when we need one?

AIDs is a very recent disease.
And let's nor forget the old double standard, and the virgin/whore dichotomy. Throughout most of history men were largely free to sleep around as they would, which iswhy prosituition was far more common than it is today, and almost always legal until the late 19th century. And wealthy men (including some high ranking churchmen) who could afford to do so even kept open mistresses which no one much disapproved up. The sexual revolution is really a revolution in female sexuality. Men are just as randy as they always were.

Actually we did (stand up to church leaders for Kerry), there are alot of us out there who have been attempting to hold the feet of hypocrites who hide behind faith, to the fire. I knew a great guy, a catholic who was fired from his job with the catholic bishops assocition because he ran an email list called catholics for Kerry. He is a truly decent and wonderful man, he was attacked for running the list with an accusation of it being silent approbation for abortion, even though he personally does not believe in abortion, though he was not judgemental against women who believe in choice. He had a wife and child who depended on him for support. Amanda and those like her, undermine stands like the one he took, she cheapens them.

Unfortunately, the next time we do, our efforts will be treated that much less seriously, because people like you give truth to the stereotype that criticism against the organized church is motivated by hate and discrimination.

I mentioned this before and I'll do it again, the director Kevin Smith was attacked by Donahue after his film Dogma was released. Smith took on Donahue intelligently, and rendered Donahue a joke. That was effective, what Amanda Marcotte did was to empower scum like Donahue.

Bev, I'll wager that you believe you're so witty, but to those of us who don't live above a glass ceiling, the rant you just made is plain full of shit.

Do you find the travesty that is the health care crisis amusing in any way? That the most powerless in this country are discriminated against (yes, true discrimination) even when they desperately need care? I'll bet you found Reagan throwing the mentally ill out on to the streets a laugh riot. I'll bet their family members weren't laughing, knowing a loved one was thrown away like that.

I know that untold thousands of critically ill people are suffering and dying as we waste time typing away into cyberspace. Because they can't get care. I lost my much loved husband last spring because even with medicare, the doctors at the public hostpital didn't feel it compensated them enough. The cancer which could have been diagnosed, without even them looking for it, quite easily, wasn't found.. because a specialist wouldn't take him without supplemental insurance.

I was fighting in 2000, and in 2002, and in '04 because I was afraid of my husband losing his life if he lost his health insurance, especially under a Bush presidency. I knew because I saw what Reagan/Bush did for 12 long years. I watched him get a diagnosis of cancer at the end of last May, I watched him get a dosage of chemotherapy, and then get worse as his kidneys and liver failed as a result. I watched him wither, I watched them pump bloody fluid out of his lungs in the ICU. I tried to comfort him while he must have been scared shitless.. and I was that scared myself. I tried to help my daughter be strong through all of this, as she was going away to school that fall, and I didn't want the hell, the despair to drag her down and destroy her future.

One day at that time, I remember the republicans in the congress attempting to push through more of their garbage. Accusing gays of destroying families. I used the cell phone the doctors insisted I purchase (they didn't seem to be able to understand that the purchase might be an expense someone in my situation might not be able to afford) to telephone the right winger member of congress who made the statement, and gave his staffer a good chewing out about what was really destroying families.

And I know that I wasn't the only one living through such a nightmare. I'll lay odds that you don't spend much time or empathy considering the suffering that's been perpetuated in the name of ideology, and it's not just the right wing ideology that's demanded that suffering, the leftist extreme share in demanding that suffering as well. So the next time you want to attempt humor, don't use the suffering of the less fortunate, their lack of access to health care as a prop. You don't have that right.

Presumably they are against men doing these things too, since men cannot have sex outside marriage unless women do too

You would think so, wouldn't you? If that were true, then you'd expect to see pharmacists refusing to sell condoms, as they currently do wrt plan B contraception. You'd be at a loss for why it's bad for girls to get a vaccination to prevent cervical cancer. When they have those creepy coming of age parties where the child promises the parent to be true to him, it's a girl promising the father, not the son promising the mother. So, yeah, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense does it? Of course, if you think about the religions of the book, and observe women's status through all three religious sects formed from Judaism, you'll see a common theme of women as people with restricted rights and limited sexual opportunity. Abraham had a concubine. There's no equivalent word for what Sarah didn't have.

I have to say I am really turned off by a certain sort of narrow feminist rant that supposes women are always and everywhere victims and men never are.

This is obviously not engaging the argument. The argument is that the evangelical right (I'm actually not talking about catholic doctrine here, which is more complicated) really does want to return to a time when women were subservient to men, had limited rights, and ceded control of reproduction to their fathers until married and then to their husbands afterwards.

They are threatened by contraception used by women because it allows women to break free of this control. This has been an element of the program they had mostly kept under wraps, preferring to focus on icky abortions, but lately, emboldened by (or perhaps anger by inaction of) Bush, they've made it clear that abortion is not the central issue. Controlling women's reproductive lives is. Hence the fights against contraception and, I can't stress this enough, rejecting a cancer vaccine.

Calling such an argument "a narrow feminist rant that supposes women are always and everywhere vicitims" is not responsive to the argument. it's also a rather amusing contradiction. How can a narrow rant be so broad as to posit that women are always and everywhere victims?

Like all zealots, you refuse to see people who hold different beliefs from you as being sincere.  They must be hypocrites.  How else are we to interpret the statement that "many anti-choice women get abortions"? 

Even if that were true - and I doubt there is more than anecdotal evidence for it - what is the relevance here?  Surely you can accept that many women are anti-choice out of sincere conviction, religious or otherwise, that abortion is wrong and should they find themselves with an unwanted pregnancy, they would accept the consequences of that conviction.

The kicker for me is the statement that some women get abortions one week and then show up on picket lines the next week.  That has to be one of the all time great throwaway smear lines, worthy of Rush, Bill, Sean and all the other wingnuts who pioneered this kind of hackery.  We expect that kind of slander from the right and are unamused when they protest that they're just engaging in a bit of harmless hyperbole.  Too bad you've decided that the best way to fight these clowns is become a clown yourself.

Had to repost this because it was censored:

Because Amanda, we are NOT the right wing, though you talk and walk like a right winger.. and in all reality, as that is what constitutes what your ethics and values are.. you might as well be.

Democrats have fought the hard fights and achieved great things. While you employ right wing tactics and help the right wing. You are a coward who refuses to even answer the hard questions. You hide behind your label of feminism and activism, but it doesn't hide the fact that you are as ignorant and hateful as any neo-nazi, any member of the klan.

I'd like to know, how much were you paid to attempt to sabotage the Edwards campaign?

In a public or legal position, refusing to take their oath unless sworn to a deity. This has even affected "organized religions"; see the withdrawal of Unitarian/Universalist approval for the religious achievement award previously issued by the Boy Scouts of America. BSA's newer social conservative leadership insisted on Scouts agreeing on belief in a Supreme Being, the context being one that is directly and consciously involved with individual people.

I would not be surprised to see such a conflict with the Buddhists, next.

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" [George Santayana]

By the way, why is preaching to the choir always trotted out as something you don't want to do? Preaching to the choir gets them energized. The right knows this and it has served them well.

I understand this sentiment. And a lot of blogospheric discussion on the right and left is of this form. It arouses the choir, reminds them what they dislike in our culture or politics, helps them shake off the stutifying raiment of everyday conventional wisdom, gives them a sense of solidarity with others out there who feel the same way - and potentially motivates them to act.

So they are energized - but energized to do what? At some point, some people need to do something besides preaching to the choir, or else you just have an aimlessly energized choir singing among themselves. People need to preach to the unconvinced and the hostile opposition, and they need to do so in a way which actually stands a chance of changing minds. Otherwise, nothing actually changes.

Much of the blogosphere - left and right - consists of co-dependent, segregated ghettos of mutual support and self-congratulation, where every invader of the happy little family is a "troll". One writer or commentator puts on a little verbal performance, full of sound and fury and wonderfully clever displays of exquisitely wrought spite, and everyone responds with applause and encourgaing words of "you tell them!" The problem is that none of "them" are listening. Only "we" are listening.

Having grown up as a non-believer in an Irish Catholic household in a predominantly Catholic town, I know all about society's double standards in the matter of religion, its hypocrisies and frauds, it's presumption that religious beliefs are out of bounds for legitimate criticism, it's weird habits of portraying powerful cultures as "persecuted", its total disrespect and loathing for atheist, agnostic or religiously unconventional thought, etc.

I also know that among these latter religiously skeptical and dissident communities, there is a lot of self-protective, self-destructive, snobbish and insular grousing - a habit of licking one's wounds obsessively and expressing oneself in a way that is almost certainly calculated not to engage and open minds, but to shut the doors of critical thinking, fellow-feeling and receptiveness right from the start, so that the speaker can then retreat back into their "we never get no respect" shell of sub-cultural isolation, armed with more manufactured excuses for failure.

One thing I have learned from the religious discussions I engaged in over the years with religious people is that if I stopped striking a pose of intellectual superiority, frustration and adolescent defiance, and was more honest about my emotional vulnerabilities, and about how being treated as a second-class citizen in America because of my beliefs pained me, that people were much more receptive. When I expressed myself in terms of angry defiance and contempt, I usually only received contempt in return, and it didn't get me anywhere.

If you are really serious about changing the culture, you need to take some responsibility for persuading people to change their minds. You need to address them from a place that is potentially accessible to them. It's no use to say, "That's unfair. Why should I have to grovel? Why should I have to meet them on their own stupid plane - the plane they have defined?" Yes of course, it is unfair. It's thoroughly unjust. If it weren't unjust there would be no need to change anything.

But maybe you don't really want to change anything. The prospect of a changing world might actually be more frightening than the prospect of the perpetuation of a somewhat frustrating dissident existence, where one at least knows one's place and can wallow in society's repudiation with one's equally frustrated and repudiated comrades.

I feel like I have known guys like Donahue from way back. I can't express enough how important it is to recognize that the Donahues of the world feed on provoking anger. Their whole bullying routine is based on the idea that they represent a weak, persecuted minority, and their technique is to provoke people into hostility and contempt and disdain so that they can then prove to onlookers that they are indeed persecuted and disdained. Profaning their reverenced symbols (as opposed to soberly and modestly criticizing some of the ideas the symbols represent) is both pointless and childish. It is a gift to them of the food that makes them stronger. The only thing that works in response is humility, modesty and dignity. The lessons of non-violent resistance apply equally well to language as physical action. It's not about rolling over. But rather, there are ways of resisting that call attention to the injustice and suffering encountered by the resistor, rather than comprising acts of violence in themselves.

I will grant that for some people the most effective form of persuasion might be a rude shock to the system: a blunt and profane tirade that blows away the final shreds of hypocrisy. But this mainly works only on people who are already convinced at heart, but just need a final jolt to complete the conversion. The really difficult challenges do not respond to that technique.

"the context being one that is directly and consciously involved with individual people"

So a "Nature's God" Whose fingers popped to give us the Big Bang, and Who thereafter left us alone, thank God, won't pass muster with the scouts any longer?

I guess I'm not shocked. I went to one Scout meeting and to me it smelt religious and military, and this was in Brooklyn, NY in 1958 or -9. It must have been worse elsewhere-- maybe much worse.

Actually, the really bad things are recent. When I was an active Scout in the sixties, and then involved as an adult, the national headquarters were in New Jersey. By and large, National had a don't ask don't tell philosophy on religion, but not on homosexuality. The latter was problematic in my troop, as we had an assistant scoutmaster pedophile, and none of the parents believed the complaints. I suspect an adult, out-of-the-closet leader would have brought a very different perspective.

I'd have to check the date, but there was essentially a hostile takeover of the national board by social and religious conservatives, and headquarters moved to Texas.

You are correct about a Gaia or disinterested creator not passing muster. Not all deities live up to the standards of the Board.

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" [George Santayana]

Try to offend an atheist or an agnostic - it's really hard or impossible.

You've got to be kidding! I've seen more than a few real-easy-to-anger ones right on this forum, with bundles of irrationality feeding the anger to boot. (Look! there's an atheist hater right behind that corner!) Came to my mind that there are a number of aetheist jihadis out there, right down to having the jihadi humiliation complex driving them. You'd think that atheists are the most persecuted people on earth, martyred day in, day out.

Browse around this website for a while:

http://www.atheists.org/

and you'll find victimhood espoused equal to or greater than Mr. Donahue's "Catholics are the only people truly smeared anymore" shtick.

Somebody at one time or another had to do something to inspire Chris Lehmann in one of my favorite articles here:

http://www.reason.com/news/show/36444.html

it couldn't just have been Sam Harris' book.

I am tempted to do a reverse "Marcotte" and say something cheap and sassy about some famous easygoing, confident, impossible-to-offend famous atheists like Stalin or Mao, but I will refrain.

Part of the Roman Catholic Vatican II theological "revolution" in the 60's was totally throwing out the Old Testament as something for the faithful to be concerned with and stressing the New Testament exclusively, "the word of Christ" as opposed to those mean old savage heathens, even more specifically, the Gospels.

Old Testament study is basically thought of as something for scholars, not really because of a willingness to deny knowledge to the people, but because Christ in the New Testament was throwing out the "old law" and replacing it with the new. For those interested in the Old Testament, in Catholic theology there is a lot of stressing of what they call "concordance," where Old Testament stories prefigure or relate to New Testament happenings.

The Catholic mass and other rituals have never stressed the Bible; study the heart of that and you will find many reasons behind Protestant Reformation faiths, who do very much rely on "the book" as a holy thing. You will also see some of the reasons for the hatred and/or fear of Catholic "papists" by WASP's in 19th and early 20th-century and indeed still showing at the time of JFK's run for president.

The Catholic liturgy is more mystical and not so much formed on "biblical word." Hence the suspicion of "papists" as believing in hocus pocus. Much of Reformation Protestantism is, despite the tendency of blogger types to laugh at those who take Christianity & the Bible seriously, much more rational and taken with the Bible as a "rule book, leaving out a hierarchy & liturgy that passes down ritual and presenting a more individual one-on-one relationship with god.

Evangelicalism/Pentacostalism, with its raptures, speaking in tongues, born again cures, joyous shouting, etc., combined with Bible study of New and Old Testament equally, and no hierarchy between the believer and god, is a sort of combo. Therein I think lies its appeal as the fastest growing religion on earth. Some forms of Islam are a close second, and no coincidence they offer similar traits.

As to the typical American Roman Catholic's view on contraception, I would suggest bloggers check some good polls before presuming those who believe in a virgin birth born of a virgin "immaculate" of sin a couple of thousand years ago also fall for the Humanae Vitae instructions from some guy appointed by poltical machinations in Vatican City. Taint always so, many seem to be able to mix a bit of myth and in with their modern life quite comfortably, sorry that it disturbs some so. I know it wouldn't bother Joseph Campbell one bit.

P.S. I am an agnostic adult product of a Vatican-II-era parochial school (now in an art history-related trade, hence I actually am wont to have the delusion that, gasp, there are actually some beautiful things as well as evil in religious culture). I was taught by those extremely liberal Teaching Sisters of St. Francis who believed in loving every little bird and bee and insect, and your neighbor as yourself, understanding the beauty of the Jewish faith and all those other faiths (except rich Protestants, of course) giving all your money to the poor in Africa, freeing the oppressed masses in Latin America (and the U.S.S.R.--some kinds of socialism was dandy, others were not--all you had to do was listen to JFK!), making restitution to the black people of America, and assorted other stuff like that. Until, of course, most of them left the convent, after finishing their church-paid college degree, to get married and go to Vietnam protests with hubbie.

Making fun of the conception of Christ seems so 1960's second grade to me; there's far greater fish to fry.

Tip for the totally clueless: Bill Donahue's organiztion is not sanctioned by the church, he is what I would call a troglodyte Catholic, probably wishes for things like Latin Mass to return, wimmins to wear lace doilies on their head in god's house again, and probably secretly sympathizes with Mel Gibson and his even more radically conservative dad. But he also has a skill at scratching at old Catholic wounds--plenty still know what "no Irish need apply" meant to great-grandpa.

Well, you're repeating my original point in one respect. Equating God with the tooth fairy is seen as derisive. I understand that.

But IME, the sentence you've bolded is true. IME, Christians who get upset when atheists make a comparison to unicorns get equally upset if you suggest there is no difference between their belief structure, and the belief structure of animists. Both belief structures are deeply held, are part of ritual events like funerals or marriages and should be on equal footing. But, again, IME, wiccans and African animists are not respected as practitioners of serious religions. Not to mention the longstanding Christian evangelical movement, designed expressly to undermine those not serious religions.

liberals are supposed to be these big cultural relativists or whatever, and yet here on the internets we frequently seem to lose sight of the fact that religion is culture. Which is not to say that cultural practices should never be criticized -- there are definitely cultural practices that I dislike, and criticize, and and sometimes even want outlawed, even though they are deeply held cultural beliefs

Again, there is this bizarre notion that remarks about religious belief is "critical" of those beliefs. It is not. Any criticism is directed not at any particular practice or belief, but at the desire to give some belief primacy over others or, worse, to impose those religious beliefs through the rule of law on other people. In the post you're responding to, my problem is that people who insist on tolerance and respect don't themselves practice tolerance and respect.

As for banning cultural practices, well that's awfully tricky. I'm likely to object to that as strongly as I object to making a kid study intelligent design. When you say "big cultural relativists" (leave aside the derision implicit in that formulation--I can live with it), you're not raising a contradiction. The same part of me that doesn't want evangelical Christians to dictate women's access to contraception also doesn't want to regulate Orthodox circumcision practices. It's not that I object to cultural and religious diversity. I object to the imposition of one religion or culture imposition on the rest of us.

You say hello to people even if you don't believe they exist? That sounds... odd :)

Yes, agnostics would be happy to go with some proof, but since such proof has not showed up yet, they don't expect it ever will. Also, agnostics recognize the limits of human knowledge and understanding.

We're stuck inside a universe, we don't know where it came from and why it exists, or even if such questions make sense. Believers think the Universe was created by god or gods, but they never stop and ask the bigger question - ok, so why do the god(s) exist and where did they come from? A deity is a non-answer.

We don't know why we're here or if we matter... so why not have some fun?

Unfortunately, the next time we do, our efforts will be treated that much less seriously, because people like you give truth to the stereotype that criticism against the organized church is motivated by hate and discrimination.

What are you talking about? Can you please tell me where that came from?

I mentioned this before and I'll do it again, the director Kevin Smith was attacked by Donahue after his film Dogma was released. Smith took on Donahue intelligently, and rendered Donahue a joke. That was effective, what Amanda Marcotte did was to empower scum like Donahue.

First off, if you find Amanda's satire offensive, you'd have to find Dogma still more offensive. The satire was directed much more broadly at the Church and its theology than anything Amanda posted.

Second, Amanda could not have responded in kind given the situation. Taking on Donohue was in Smith's publicity interests. It would not have been in Edwards' interest.

As for whether this helps or hurts Donohue, time will tell. I don't think his press releases will be stenographed onto the front page so quickly in the future. But you could be right.

I've learned that there are (at least) two kinds of agnostics:

• Those who have known enough hard-core atheists (those who believe there is no God) to realize that there's a distinction between not believing in God and believing there is no God.
  
• Those who don't understand the distinction.
  

• Those who have known enough intelligent, informed agnostics to realize that being an agnostic is not the same as being wishy-washy.
  
• Those who have only met agnostics who haven't taken enough time to think about what they believe. These people often think that all agnostics fall into this camp.
  

I wouldn't excuse male promiscuity either. I think men with a Don Juan complex are severely flawed. All I'm saying - and maybe I'm speaking from a kind of 'peasant morality' - is that promiscuity has, and still does, pose real risks to one's body - not just a 'soul.' There was even a study saying the more partners a woman has, the more likely she is to get cervical cancer.

With a handle like Libertine perhaps it's not a surprise that you would approve of the Edwards' bloggers salty tone. It's also true that Jesus associated with reviled people like tax collectors, beggars and prostitutes.

At the same time, I don't think you get to be a naughty little potty mouth, going out of your way to be vulgar and offensive, then turn around and play the victim when people are - surprise - offended and grossed out by it. They seem to want it both ways: they want to get up in people's faces and profane their beliefs, but then they expect to do that without any negative consequences. It's like, which is it? Do you want to offend with trash talk and gutter speak or do you want to be taken seriously and be respected?

Since a human brought up without references on homosexuality still may be attracted to the same gender, the analogy goes just so far. We have additional data that homosexuality develops in primitive cultures, in primates, and in lower animal orders (ok...to adviser: cats are not lower).

I don't argue that a person brought up without any exposure to organized religion or religious writings may independently develop some principles of faith, and may later find these principles consistent with some religion -- or not.

Still, the major determinant of one's faith is one's parents' faith.

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" [George Santayana]

Brad,

"Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice."

You've got to break some eggs for your liberty omelete. Some of those eggs can be, civility, mutal respect and intellectual honesty. If the other guy's cutting corners, it gives you license to do the same thing. Words are mere weapons and this is war.

When you're Joan of Arc, hey, some heads are gonna roll, but it's all for a higher purpose.

I see this same mentality in all the hot button issues including gun control and the Palestine question.

And here we are, full circle:

There was even a study saying the more partners a woman has, the more likely she is to get cervical cancer.

And that is because she would be more likely to be exposed to Human Papiloma Virus, which is now preventable with a vaccine.

Which is why certain people don't want their little darlings to get the vaccine. They think that getting the vaccine will turn them into sluts. As if a 15 year-old girl in the back seat of a car will think: "Wow, my parents didn't let me get the vaccine so I better not have sex with Bobby because I might get cervical cancer in 20 years."

Yep! It's all about payback. You girls have sex before marriage --> You deserve cervical cancer; if you get pregnant, well, you gotta have that baby! Never mind that the baby is doomed to being parented by someone who doesn't want him/her. And don't go with the adoption argument -- I am the lucky mother of 3 adopted children -- most people who keep unwanted pregancies keep their unwanted children. It is rare to actually do such a brave and selfless thing as to give up a baby.

Jan Knaus

the difference between the church and the international jewry is that the former represents a religion's decisionmakers while the latter is the people who follow a religion's decision makers. That's why criticising international jewry feels worse - you'd actually be attacking the people who make up a religion, not the religion itself, a distinction Amanda made in her article. Her point is that Christianity, as a religion, has many offensive tenets yet turning a critical eye to these tenets creates a storm of fury. No where in the article or in the mentioned blog posts does Amanda criticize Christians as a whole. So, no, don't replace "church" with "international jewry."

Let me get this straight, and I understand you to be referring to the Roman Catholic Church, not Christianity in general. Unquestionably, the hierarchy of the Church, from the Pope on down, is a decisionmaking structure.

Other than perhaps Hasidic Rebbes, what is the leadership equivalent in Judaism? Rabbis tend to be ordained and on their own, depending on their congregation for continued employment. A rabbi is trained, much as is an imam, in interpretation and religious jurisprudence, rather than "leadership". Independent study and interpretation of revelations and commentaries on them have always been prized among Jews.

If you are thinking of the Government of Israel, that is arguably the leadership of most, if not all, Zionists. Not all Zionists are Jews and not all Jews are Zionists.
--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" [George Santayana]

I always tell people the first thing they should read is Matthew, Chap 6. That's where Jesus says that you should pray privately in a closet where no one can see you, and no one should know you've been praying.

If one understands that Noah's vessel was made of steel, not wood, this is perfectly reasonable. His wife did the Arc welding.

For the record, my mother was a US Navy Chief Aviation Metalsmith in WWII, and taught welding. After the war, she trained in psychiatric social work, to learn the cutting torches of the mind.
--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" [George Santayana]

You may have a point. Something to think about.

Somehow a duplicate accidently was created while I was attempting to post the first. Sorry.

Now THAT'S funny. :-)

Still, the major determinant of one's faith is one's parents' faith.

This is true, but so what?  It's identity we're talking about and identity is always a product of both innate characteristics (i.e. race, gender etc.) and environmental factors.

I just don't see how one can say it's OK to insult one aspect of identity and not OK to insult another aspect.  At some point, the provenance of the various elements of identity cease to matter.  Peoples' identity is what they think it is.

=== In most cases, especially when the individual is not part of a community that shuns apostates, there will be no great consequences of a change. ===

In which we learn that hcb does not consider the loss of one's immortal soul to be a "great consequence"!

sPh

But gee, that would defeat the whole purpose!

Jan Knaus

Not only do you have a seemingly inexhaustible knowledge about military stuff and medical stuff and technical/logistical stuff and a billion other kinds of stuff that I am not even sure how to categorize... but I am beginning to think that you know every Unitarian joke every uttered since the beginning of time.

Brother Cattle Prod of Profound Knowledge, is there anything worth knowing that you have not mastered?

I betcha Howard doesn't know who sang the best last night on American Idol.

(LaKisha, for the record...) 

Dissent Protects Democracy.

You are absolutely correct; I've never watched the show.

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" [George Santayana]

The answer has to do with life and the human value of life. If you believe that it is ok to kill a lump of 100 cells, then is it ok to kill a lump of 2,000,000 cells? What about something with eye buds, a brain and a backbone? What about a baby that is 7 months along and viable outside the womb? Is abortion morally viable in that case? Just where is it no longer okay dokay to casually take life? I don't know. I don't think you do either.

Once we begin casual abortions, the next step is casually throwing unwanted babies on trash dumps (don't laugh that is what the Romans did.) How about killing little urchin kids down in the poor parts of town because they just use too many social services and grow up to add to parent more unemployed. (Don't laugh that has been a real problem among police in Brazil and Argentina)

If you believe it is generally immoral to take any life then you have to confront the question of when life begins. You have to decide when somebody becomes human. That is what the Romans did. Maybe that is what you want to do. You tell me when does that lump of cells become life? When does it become human life? Or maybe you to propose a sliding morality scale that says it is ok to take one life and not another. Who are you to say that one life is better than another? Who are you to judge?

In the case of abortion there is another person involved--the mother. She knows better than anybody the issues of life and death she faces. I don't. Neither do you. Neither does any judge. If she concludes that removing that child from her body is necessary, then that is her choice. I will go with it. Now if the child is viable, letting it die is the same as throwing the baby on the trash heap or shooting the little street urchin in the head. Of course, you might choose to throw babies on trash heaps or to shoot little urchins in the head. I part company with you at that point.

I am always amused when people forget that you don't have to be religious to be moral or ethical. Claiming to be an atheist doesn't earn anybody a get out of doing right free card.

Ron Byers

IME, Christians who get upset when atheists make a comparison to unicorns get equally upset if you suggest there is no difference between their belief structure, and the belief structure of animists.

I am Christian.  I get upset when people compare God to unicorns.  I do not get upset when people compare a belief in God to animism.

When people generalize about Christians and religion and religious people and belief in God, etc., it doesn't just apply to Jerry Falwell.  It applies to me.  It applies to my grandmother.  Some Christians are not tolerant and respectful of you, I understand.  Some atheists are not tolerant and respectful of me, either.  That does not mean that all atheists who request tolerance and respect from me are themselves intolerant and disrespectful. 

When you say "big cultural relativists" (leave aside the derision implicit in that formulation--I can live with it), you're not raising a contradiction. The same part of me that doesn't want evangelical Christians to dictate women's access to contraception also doesn't want to regulate Orthodox circumcision practices. It's not that I object to cultural and religious diversity.  

I say "big cultural relativists" as a joking appropriation of how liberals are sometimes characterized -- I'm one of those big cultural relativists, after all.  Well, sort of.  Like I said, I don't think all criticism of cultural practices is out of bounds.  If you believe in universal human rights, as I and many liberals do, there's really no way around it.

I doubt that we can ever completely reconcile the tension between human rights and multiculturalism, but we can have a healthy respect for that tension, and at least approach our criticisms with a minimum of condescension for other people's beliefs, doing our best not to disrespect an entire cultural tradition in the process of criticizing particular practices. 

To get credit for criticizing cultural practices without disrespecting an entire cultural tradition, though, we have to actually not disrespect the entire cultural tradition.  Saying "I'm opposed to these guys dictating access to contraception, and oh by the way, God is just like a unicorn" doesn't cut it.

As for banning cultural practices, well that's awfully tricky. I'm likely to object to that as strongly as I object to making a kid study intelligent design.

What I have in mind when I mention banning cultural practices is stuff like, say, muti killing -- not that anyone's going around performing muti killings nearby... I hope.... but just as an example...

heh heh.

Can 33 million people a night be wrong? 

Dissent Protects Democracy.

If that were true, then you'd expect to see pharmacists refusing to sell condoms, as they currently do wrt plan B contraception.

Yeah, just like they don't sell diaphragms and regular birth control. Er, wait...

Do you really not understand why plan B is different? I don't agree with these people but I understand the difference. Plan B prevents implantation, but not fertilization. If you're an extreme pro-lifer, you think life begins at fertilization. I've never even heard Catholics (who are against condoms, too) argue that life begins at ejaculation.

You'd be at a loss for why it's bad for girls to get a vaccination to prevent cervical cancer.

Getting harder to defend, but I'll try. Presumably, these same people would be against a vaccine to prevent testicular cancer if it were caused by a sexually transmitted disease. Presumably. If you haven't heard Steven Colbert's take on this, you should.

When they have those creepy coming of age parties where the child promises the parent to be true to him, it's a girl promising the father, not the son promising the mother.

OK, now we have a winner. I see no way to argue against that point.

So you are defending this? OK,

#1 "Do you really not understand why plan B is different? I don't agree with these people but I understand the difference.  Plan B prevents implantation, but not fertilization.

Plan B works at the point of an 8-celled embryo, or before. 

If you're an extreme pro-lifer, you think life begins at fertilization. 

So what?  To paraphrase what we so often ask here, please site something biblical that justifies your stance.  If you're that exreme a pro-lifer, and it's just the way you think about it, who should listen to you anyway?  

#2 You'd be at a loss for why it's bad for girls to get a vaccination to prevent cervical cancer.

Getting harder to defend, but I'll try. Presumably, these same people would be against a vaccine to prevent testicular cancer if it were caused by a sexually transmitted disease. 

 What if these same devout people didn't want you to get Penicillin if you had Syphillis?  Gonorrhea?  Tetracycline for Chlamydia?  All ridiculous, right?

It's the PREVENTIVE nature that gets them.  There is this absurd belief that if you can prevent a pregnancy or a disease it will lead to promiscuity. 

I guess that is why Science is the enemy for these people.

At least you didn't try to defend #3 (I won't even repeat it)

Jan Knaus

More devil's advocate (i.e., I'm arguing for the challenge only)

#1 "Do you really not understand why plan B is different? I don't agree with these people but I understand the difference. Plan B prevents implantation, but not fertilization.

Plan B works at the point of an 8-celled embryo, or before.

If you're an extreme pro-lifer, you think life begins at fertilization.

So what? To paraphrase what we so often ask here, please site something biblical that justifies your stance. If you're that exreme a pro-lifer, and it's just the way you think about it, who should listen to you anyway?

I can respect that point, but it glosses over the fact that plan B is different. My point is merely that the belief that life starts at fertilization is not misogynistic. It may be hard to understand and is not supported (nor contradicted) by the Bible, but it is not inherently misogynistic. (I.e., you might argue that it has misogynistic consequences, but the belief itself is not misogynistic.) I'm just trying to keep the debate honest here!

Words are useful tools for extracting information from human experience. Without education and the discipline required to think clearly it is hard to get at the data. It is also next to impossible to figure out what is going on and to make good decisions. Effective democracy requires intelligent, informed decision making. You have demonstrated that you don't understand the word "humanist." You are confusing it with "humanitarian." It is not surprising that you think I am "redefining" terms since you appear to be unfamiliar with some basic concepts that underpin liberalism and humanism.

You obviously prefer the feel-good world of political correctness to serious and possibly controversial inquiry. You smugly sit there like the teacher's pet correcting everybody else's paper based on your silly tell other people what to do checklist. Like the religionist you think that because your poisonous ideas have a sugar coating they should be given a free pass.

Illegal abortions -- such as those performed with a coat hanger -- do damage to the uterus and in fact frequently result in peritonitis, which is a horrible way to die. Jumping off buildings, swallowing poisons, and other things women did to terminate unwanted pregnancies were also bad for their health.

Abortions performed on a dilated uterus by a trained physician at less than three months gestation in a sanitary environment are less dangerous than extracting a tooth.

That is why doctors who as interns saw young girls coming into the emergency room dying in agony of peritonitis agitated to decriminalize abortion and make it legal in the first trimester (which is what Roe versus Wade decided).

I had cousins who were obstetricians who were adamant on this point. Some of them were very emotional about what they had seen and said they would do an abortion on any woman who asked at no charge (this was in the early sixties).

Other forms of birth control are better than abortion of course, but my own mother and grandmother had several and it didn't affect their health in any way, nor that of millions and millions of other women who had them.

and yet I am wrong. And dumb. Really, really dumb. It is not political correctness that I believe in. It is humility.

And this does make you in the end a wise democrat (small d.) Congrats on gaining what is ironically labeled "wisdom of age." :-) I think perhaps it's not really about number of years lived, but about how many aches and pains you have experienced, both your own, and others'. Successful snark requires it, doncha think?

In Ireland, until the mid-seventies, women who gave birth out of wedlock, or merely flirted, could be imprisoned at a convent at the request of any male family members or clergy. Once there, she was fed starvation rations and verbally abused by the nuns while being used as slave labor to earn money for the convent by doing laundry for the surrounding community. She remained in this condition until a male relative appeared at the convent to remove her. Many were imprisoned for their entire lives. This tradition dated back centuries. Of course, no action was ever taken against the male who impregnated her.

This was actually common throughout Europe since Christianity knocked out the indigenous religions. The nunnery was the choice for any woman who was considered disgraced.

In Ireland, and throughout Europe, the local lord retained the right to bed a woman on her wedding night. If she was found not to be a virgin, she and her husband were executed. This was sanctioned by the church, as an extension of the divine right of kings, the theory by which the church gained political power in the Dark and Middle Ages.

In Africa, the church has been sending emissaries to villages in the areas most affected by AIDS. They have been telling the villagers for years that condoms have tiny holes that allow the Aids virus in. The priests tell the people that the Aids prevention people who come to educate them are lying because they want to kill them. The Aids workers have tried to overcome this by hanging up water filled condoms and encouraging people to come back and see that the condoms don't leak. Since the lies have the authority of the church behind them, the tactic does not work very well.

Last year, the church finally decreed that a woman married to a man infected with Aids could demand use of a condom to avoid infection herself, without going to hell. This, however, was only sanctioned by the church if the man demanded sex; abstinence was the preferred alternative.

The church is all about controlling sexuality. The goal is distraction; if a woman is responsible for controlling her own and her family's sexuality, or gossiping about her neighbor's, she is not going to have much time to challenge illiteracy, poverty, or decrees of war. She retains her economic usefulness and gives birth to future laborers without causing too much trouble.

This is only one facet of the tactics which the church used to maintain political and economic power throughout the last two millenia. The present dilemma has come about because the tactics have been modified through three generations of Madison Avenue propaganda refinement and a new variant of Christianity, Christian Reconstructionism, has been written to support a fascist takeover of our government.

IMHO, misogyny is only one of the tactics historically employed and encouraged by the church in its pursuit of dominance.

Religions, or freedom from religion, essentially dictate value systems which conflict. As a solution, I envision a world where each citizen could designate on her tax forms what values could be supported with her tax money. For instance, if I am opposed to space exploration, whether on moral or pragmatic grounds, I could designate that my tax money is not to be spent on NASA. An aggregate value system would emerge which would reflect the values and priorities of the majority, while respecting the rights of the minority. And isn't that what these United States are supposed to be about?

A liberal is someone who believes in freedom through education, not a feel-good sentimentalist.

Support that statement with citations to some of the great works of liberal philosophy? Or are you simply talking about Liberal in the modern American context?
Do you even know which one you are talking about?

That statement is Bush-like in its lack of perception. Have you ever actually read anything?

Making decisions that were in the interest of the citizenry would be a good start. That's kind of essential to people defining their own world. If a government is mostly making bad decisions because its leaders are stupid and corrupt (ineffective) there won't be a lot of equality and rights for long. While you humbly hand-wring over irrelevancies, our moron president and his minions are destroying American democracy.

Define the interest of the citizenry. According to the latest poll, Bush is back up to 39 percent of the country supporting him, which would imply that 39 percent of the country thinks Bush is in their best interests. So in your framework, they are either stupid or uneducated. Well, those are just personal attacks on people who conceptualize their interests differently than you do. Reliance on this fallacy makes your position untenable.

Frankly, to measure democracy's "effectiveness" seems to be an impossible task. At least how you have conceptualized effectiveness as operating in what is the best interests of the citizenry, such a task is impossible because we cannot determine the metric you want to use. Furthermore, your metric implies an essentialized and reified conception of what is "the interest of the citizenry." Your metric is analytically useless because you are assuming a perfect interest of the citizenry that is not being met, as opposed to understanding that any "interest" the citizenry has develops through processes such that different collections of people can have different definitions of interests. This may result because you are fundamentally misunderstanding what is "democracy." Furthermore, you seem to be using "citizenry" as a concrete entity instead of recognizing the abstract nature of the term. This also weakens your point.

All of this is to say: In open democratic governments, the people get the government they deserve.

Oops-pow Suprise! oooooooohhhh!

Most people do have moral qualms about abortion after the first trimester.

That is why, legally and ethically, a doctor's consultation is required to have an abortion at that point -- as is the case when downs syndrome is discovered, or, as in the case of an acquaintance of mine, when ultrasound at four months gestation revealed the foetus to have no kidneys (the couple went on to have several healthy children). After the second trimester, abortion is only permitted to save the life of the mother and has to be approved by a medical board.

I am not sure people's feelings about the sexual act and abortion can be so cavalierly minimized as "an irrational sex phobia," given the serious consequences that can result, and historically, which did result, when pregancy and its complications (including voluntary termination of pregnancy) involved a very real risk of death for the mother.

People's qualms about casual sex, and especially casual sex without contraception, have a sound basis, I think.

I have never heard anyone say "Life begisn at fertilzation". The usual phrase is "Life begins at cocneption." To be sure many pro-Lifers are under the assumption that fertilization IS conception, which is scientifically false.

Re: Without believing that life starts at conception it is very hard to punish women for sex.

The ancients, who generally held that life began at around 40 days (the "quickening)" had no trouble maintaining a harshly patriarchal and misogynistic society, sometimes locking up their (respectable) women as firmly as fundamentalist Muslims do today, and punishing with death daughters who "dishonored" the family.

The most common fallacy about atheists is that we "hate" god. We no more hate god or the gods than we hate unicorns. We just don't believe.

If it were that simple, you would not offer arguments. Can't say you "hate" God anymore than anyone else who sins. Hatred means to avoid something, as one meaning goes. When Adam sinned he avoided God in the Garden of Eden. That account was written to express a spiritual reality that occurs when people sin. They avoid God. Another meaning of hate is "ill will" or "strong dislike," the first one implying that the hater would wish something ill to happen to the hated. The last has to do with simply not preferring someone or something, to the point of avoiding, excluding, banishing or discriminating against them as regards your company. The implication of that is, the company of other people is very important to us, and to be excluded affects us with feelings of hurt.

Avoiding or negating God will not help us to avoid doing wrong, however, and clearly, some things for you are wrong, i.e. taking away what you call "basic rights," and some things are right or good, like affording "basic rights" to women. We may differ on what a right is, but you do have a code of right and wrong by which you judge the religious, and you inherited it. Either you agree with the standards by which you judge them, or you mean nothing when you criticize (kritos / judge) because you don't believe in the right/wrongs you use to criticize with. And yet, many of these rights and wrongs are deeply held by religious persons as well.

Frequently, our lack of love in this world being what it is, it depends on whose ox is gored . . . that is, if it hurts you or a category you belong to it is a wrong. If it hurts someone else who you have a case against (i.e. religious people for being hypocrites etc. etc.) then, well, see, they had it coming. But not you. You deserve every basic right you have and could apparently do nothing to warrant a check on those rights. What you want is carte blanche to hurt the unborn in revenge against the religious whom you feel have wronged you and gotten away with hypocrisy and power plays for too long now. But two wrongs don't make a right.

But one double standard that definitely exists is the idea that religion and religious belief is somehow exempt from the same kind of scrutiny that anything else gets. In addition, there's blatant, unfair prejudice against atheists.

 Religion has been scrutinized in so many countless volumes of dialogue, theological analysis, philosophical analysis and pop-analysis, that the statement you make above is deeply autistic. Atheism is a minority belief in a majority rule country. That is why atheists afford themselves of the court systems to try to compensate for this disadvantage. That is a right atheists have not been deprived of, is the access to courts, to the redress of grievances. Using that right, they have made some bad constitutional law that overreaches into religious rights of other people, and have also made some good legal points protective of everyone's rights. Religious folks have done the same. In your discussions, I see a form of exceptionalism which you apply to yourself as a self-identified atheist.

Besides that, in terms of convincing religious people that you do not hate God (which in at least one sense of the word you do and in another you don't) using digs like the "unicorn" comparison, while better than other comparisons, greatly simplifies the faith and rendering of a great many people's sacred texts, and, even to the point of ignoring ancient literatures for literary devices and even political survival tactics employed in writing about things that could get you killed in those times.  Especially the prophets.

But there's good reasons to impugn the motivations of people who use piety as a cover for their political agitation to strip me and all women of our basic rights.

 The bottom line is this: most religious people who are parents see their children and unborn children as sacred, whatever their own falls and sins may have done to the parents since they enjoyed the innocent state of the womb. However most have not lost their faith the point that they still strongly hold to the belief that if you pith the brain of a human baby whose chief difference from a born one is how he or she gets her oxygen, and in her level and form of dependence on mom, dad and other people, you have done an atrocity.

Many of such people see the arguments analogizing unborn human life with cancers and calling it collections of cells as merely a false labeling technique of psychological denial about taking human life, and at the worst, a venal attempt to camouflage it knowingly as a sort of spiteful revenge for misogyny in the culture. Again, while many fundamentalists are pig-headedly autistic to classes of persons  (particularly persons whose neediness makes them feel inadequate or unable to solve the problem) is a distortion of spirituality by politics. Politics seeks the greatest sum of power -- to get control of 'the program' and the power of the state, and then by partisanship gets a fraction of what otherwise could have been accomplished another way. Spiritual religiosity isn't contaminated by economic prosperity doctrines or political ambition, but merely starts doing good right around the spot where the religious person lives, beginning in their hearts. Some of your assertions wrongly assume that there are not a geater number of such people silently walking the walk, struggling, falling down, getting up, and forgiving and loving and fighting for the good.

Certain doctrines have imposed a lethal mixture of ambitious world politics with once spiritual religions and have thereby scattered the spiritual ones and left the church in control of the earthly minded. However, do not think that because someone is in an organized religious setting that they are or are not God's or that because someone is not in that setting that they are or are not God's. You can't tell by the location or association alone.

Spiritual people are sprinkled throughout the world like seasoning. They will not tell you who they are, however, some figure it out. And they would not comment on their own spiritual advancement or the purity of their religiosity. Pride seeks to dominate all of us, and put us all at odds, if possible, to our deathbeds. It is an evil spiritual force this pride, and human beings help sustain it; right down to me and you.

I could list a million reasons, but one of the most obvious is that sexists of all sorts of faiths that would otherwise be at each others' throats over deep religious differences are happy to set those differences aside for the greater mission of denying women basic rights.

 I could list a million reasons, but one of the most obvious is that atheist women of all opinions that would otherwise be at each others' throats over power-seeking, competitive posturing, are happy to set those differences aside for the greater mission of denying the unborn and religious persons their basic rights.

Maybe by reading this, you can see why others are offended by your minimization of their thoughts, beliefs, hearts, souls and committments in life in the name of your own. 

The tip-toeing around religious sensitivities has created this bizarre situation where people can say with a straight face to judge someone's sincerity by their Jesus-loving words rather than their woman-hating actions, and we as a society need to find a way to get past that.

Again:

The tip-toeing around atheist sensitivities has created this bizarre situation where people can say with a straight face to judge someone's sincerity by their politic-loving words rather than their majority-hating actions, and we as a society need to find a way to get past that.