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