Click below for an interview by Conatus News with Grand Traverse Humanists vice-president Scott Blair:

http://www.conatusnews.com/interview-with-scott-blair.html

May 31, 2015

On his popular science blog, Pharyngula, PZ Myers has entertained millions of readers with his infectious love of evolutionary science and his equally infectious disdain for creationism, biblical literalism, intelligent design theory, and other products of godly illogic. This funny and fearless book collects and expands on some of his most popular writings, giving the religious fanaticism of our times the gleeful disrespect it deserves by skewering the apocalyptic fantasies, magical thinking, hypocrisies, and pseudoscientific theories advanced by religious fundamentalists of all stripes. Forceful and articulate, scathing and funny, The Happy Atheist is a reaffirmation of the revelatory power of humor and the truth-revealing powers of science and reason.

A federal court in Indiana has rejected atheists’ requests to preside at wedding ceremonies, saying only clergy or public officials are licensed to solemnize marriages.

A lawsuit filed by the Indiana chapter of the Center for Inquiry argued that an Indiana law that requires marriages to be “solemnized” — made official by signing a marriage license — only by clergy, judges, mayors or local government clerks — violates the Constitution.

But Judge Sarah Evans Barker of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Indiana ruled on Friday (Nov. 30) that marriage has religious roots. Therefore, government regulation of marriage is an act of religious accommodation — not endorsement — and protected by the Constitution.

She also noted that Indiana’s law does not limit who may marry the plaintiffs, but only who may sign their license.

“We in no way intend to question or disparage plaintiff’s opinions regarding the institution of marriage,” Barker wrote in her ruling. “But we must gently remind plaintiffs that the free exercise clause (of the Constitution) is not a guarantee against inconvenience.”

CFI, a 24,000-member secular humanist organization based in New York, had argued that barring “secular celebrants” from solemnizing marriages provides preferential treatment to religious celebrants. CFI began certifying celebrants to perform marriages and other ceremonies in 2009.

CFI’s lawsuit was filed last October on behalf of John Kiel and Michelle Landrum, two Kentucky residents who wished to be married in Indiana by Reba Boyd Wooden, a CFI-certified secular celebrant. All three were co-plaintiffs in the suit.

Ron Lindsay, CFI’s president, promised an appeal of Barker’s ruling.

“It would be difficult to imagine a clearer way to classify nonbelievers as second-class citizens,” Lindsay said in a statement. “A wedding is one of the most important ceremonies in a person’s life, and it is just as meaningful to atheists as it is to theists. It’s disappointing that a 21st-century court refused to recognize this reality.”

Indiana Attorney General Greg Zoeller described the current law as a “very reasonable requirement.”

As the circus that is the Republican presidential sweepstakes pulls into New Hampshire, local legislators seem to be working overtime to shift the political pendulum even further to the right. And by doing so they’re threatening to destroy both religion and science.

Two anti-evolution bills have just been introduced and will be taken up by the New Hampshire legislature in February. The first, the handiwork of Republican legislators Gary Hopper and John Burt, is little more than the standard anti-intellectual attack on evolution claiming that evolution is “only a theory” and thus shouldn’t be presented as fact in science classes. The only thing that makes this attempt to keep students from learning the best science possible different from similar failed attempts elsewhere is the fact that Hopper didn’t hide his motives as well as other legislators have.

As the Concord Monitor noted, “Hopper points to the state constitution and its order that teachers support their students’ ‘morality and piety’ for the justification of his bill.” The article goes on to explain, “He would like to see intelligent design – the idea that a creator controlled how early life on Earth developed – taught in classrooms, but hasn’t been able to find an example of the philosophy being successfully legislated into schools.”

Of course Hopper hasn’t found an example of intelligent design successfully legislated into public schools. How could he? Intelligent design, after all, is nothing more than standard-fare creationism gussied up to look like something it isn’t – and even with its fancy accoutrements, it has never passed legal muster. Simply put, as the courts have determined, teaching intelligent design in public schools tramples on the constitution’s first amendment protection by promoting one particular form of religion in the name of science.

As ridiculous as all of this is, it doesn’t compare to the looniness that defines the second anti-evolution bill. This one, introduced by Republican Jerry Bergevin, also demands that evolution be taught as a theory (as if there’s any other way to teach it), but it goes much further. It would require that public school science classes be dramatically expanded to explicitly include politics and religion. Bizarrely, Bergevin demands that students be taught about the personal opinions, opinions unrelated to science, of the scientists, from Darwin to the present, who are responsible for the theory of evolution. Just so you know I’m not making this stuff up, here’s what the bill requires students learn: “the theorists’ political and ideological viewpoints and their position on the concept of atheism.”

As oddly worded as that is, it’s far more coherent than how Bergevin justified his position to the Monitor. Here, in full, is what he had to say:

I want the full portrait of evolution and the people who came up with the ideas to be presented. It’s a worldview and it’s godless. Atheism has been tried in various societies, and they’ve been pretty criminal domestically and internationally. The Soviet Union, Cuba, the Nazis, China today: they don’t respect human rights. As a general court we should be concerned with criminal ideas like this and how we are teaching it. . . . Columbine, remember that? They were believers in evolution. That’s evidence right there. (ellipsis in original)

It’s all but impossible to know where to begin to set the record straight – or if it’s even worth the effort to do so. Recognizing the hopelessness of the task, let me make just a couple of points.

First, Bergevin is channeling Tom DeLay, the indicted former congressman from Texas, when he points to the Columbine tragedy as a reason to steer clear of evolution. DeLay famously had his own incoherent moment on this topic on the floor of the House when proclaimed that Columbine happened “because our school systems teach our children that they are nothing but glorified apes who have evolutionized (sic) out of some primordial mud.”

Second, Bergevin seems to have no sense of what happened in the Soviet Union when it outlawed the basics of evolutionary theory. T.D. Lysenko, the dominant Soviet voice in genetics from the mid-1930s to the mid-1960s, felt that evolutionary theory had too many capitalistic overtones and demanded that genetics research in the Soviet Union conform with Marxist ideology. The result? The loss of an entire generation of agricultural geneticists and the decimation of Soviet agronomy leading to massive wheat shortages.

Third, scientific knowledge must be judged independently of the political beliefs of scientists. Whether an idea has standing within the scientific community should be a result of the data in support of that idea and not whether you like the politics of the scientist proposing the idea. Scientific knowledge, but not the creation of public policy based on science, is independent of politics.

Fourth, evolutionary theory has absolutely nothing to do with religion and it certainly makes no statements about the viability of atheism. As I’ve said so many times before, the very existence of The Clergy Letter Project demonstrates that thousands of religious leaders have absolutely no trouble embracing evolution while remaining true to their faith. Yes, one narrow view of religion, the view that Bergevin seems to be embracing, has a problem with modern science, but we should recognize it for the narrow perspective that it is.

None of this is new – and all of it becomes incredibly tiresome. So why should we care? Simply, it’s important that we consistently resist anti-intellectual, anti-science and anti-religious legislation of this sort whenever it appears because if we don’t, we run the risk of further destroying our scientific infrastructure and limiting our religious freedoms.

The US Supreme Court perhaps said it best in 1968 when it unanimously ruled that Arkansas’s creationism law was unconstitutional: “The antecedents of today’s decision are many and unmistakable. They are rooted in the foundation soil of our Nation. They are fundamental to freedom.”

Forty four years later, those words remain every bit as powerful and every bit as important. Perhaps it would be useful if some legislators spent some time studying history rather than attempting to dismantle science education.

Michael Zimmerman, Ph.D.
Founder, The Clergy Letter Project

November 22, 2013

Despite last-minute efforts by some board members and political activists to derail the adoption of two textbooks, the State Board of Education today voted to adopt all of the proposed instructional materials up for adoption for high school biology and environmental science. Throughout the adoption process, publishers refused to make concessions that would have compromised science instruction on evolution and climate change in their textbooks, said Texas Freedom Network President Kathy Miller.

“It’s hard to overstate the importance of today’s vote, which is a huge win for science education and public school students in Texas,” Miller said. “Four years ago this board passed controversial curriculum standards some members hoped would force textbooks to water down instruction on evolution and climate change. But that strategy has failed because publishers refused to lie to students and parents demanded that their children get a 21st-century education based on established, mainstream science.”

The board voted to adopt all textbooks and instructional materials submitted by 14 publishers for high school biology and high school environmental science. None of those textbooks call into question the overwhelming evidence supporting evolution and climate change science.

The adoption of the Pearson biology textbook is contingent on the review by a panel of three science experts of factual “errors” alleged by an anti-evolution activist who served on the official state review team this summer. The publisher has insisted that the alleged errors are, in fact, accurate representations of established, mainstream science.

The board adopted the Houghton Mifflin Harcourt environmental science textbook after the publisher submitted a document agreeing to revise material that might be outdated. Scientists who have reviewed the publisher’s proposed revisions were satisfied that none of the revisions would compromise the integrity of the science in the textbook, Miller said.

###

The Texas Freedom Network is a nonpartisan, grassroots organization of religious and community leaders who support public education, religious freedom and individual liberties. The public education and religious liberties watchdog is based in Austin.

Why aren’t Republicans more afraid? The entire premise of both the government shutdown and the threats to force the government into debt default is that Democrats care more about the consequences of these actions than the Republicans do. Republicans may go on TV and shed crocodile tears about national monuments being shut down, but the act isn’t really fooling the voters: The only way to understand these fights is to understand that the GOP is threatening to destroy the government and the world economy in order to get rid of Obamacare (as well as a panoply of other right wing demands). Just as terrorists use the fact that you care more about the lives of the hostages than they do to get leverage, Republican threats rely on believing they don’t care about the consequences, while Democrats do.

So why aren’t they more afraid? Businessweek, hardly a liberal news organization, said the price of default would be “a financial apocalypse” that would cause a worldwide economic depression.  This is the sort of thing that affects everyone. Having a right wing ideology doesn’t magically protect your investments from crashing alongside the rest of the stock market.

The willingness of Republicans to take the debt ceiling and the federal budget hostage in order to try to extract concessions from Democrats is probably the most lasting gift that the Tea Party has granted the country. More reasonable Republican politicians fear being primaried by Tea Party candidates. A handful of wide-eyed fanatics in Congress have hijacked the party. The Tea Party base and the hard right politicians driving this entire thing seem oblivious to the consequences. It’s no wonder, since so many of them—particularly those in leadership—are fundamentalist Christians whose religions have distorted their worldview until they cannot actually see what they’re doing and what kind of damage it would cause.

The press often talks about the Tea Party like they’re secularist movement that is interested mainly in promoting “fiscal conservatism”, a vague notion that never actually seems to make good on the promise to save taxpayer money. The reality is much different: The Tea Party is actually driven primarily by fundamentalist Christians whose penchant for magical thinking and belief that they’re being guided by divine forces makes it tough for them to see the real world as it is.

It’s not just that the rogue’s gallery of congress people who are pushing the hardest for hostage-taking as a negotiation tactic also happens to be a bench full of Bible thumpers. Pew Research shows that people who align with the Tea Party are more likely to not only agree with the views of religious conservatives, but are likely to cite religious belief as their prime motivation for their political views.  White evangelicals are the religious group most likely to approve of the Tea Party. Looking over the data, it becomes evident that the “Tea Party” is just a new name for the same old white fundamentalists who would rather burn this country to the ground than share it with everyone else, and this latest power play from the Republicans is, in essence, a move from that demographic to assert their “right” to control the country, even if their politicians aren’t in power.

It’s no surprise, under the circumstances, that a movement controlled by fundamentalist Christians would be oblivious to the very real dangers that their actions present. Fundamentalist religion is extremely good at convincing its followers to be more afraid of imaginary threats than real ones, and to engage in downright magical thinking about the possibility that their own choices could work out very badly. When you believe that forcing the government into default in an attempt to derail Obamacare is the Lord’s work, it’s very difficult for you to see that it could have very real, negative effects.

It’s hard for the Christian fundamentalists who run the Republican Party now to worry about the serious economic danger they’re putting the world in, because they are swept up in worrying that President Obama is an agent of the devil and that the world is on the verge of mayhem and apocalypse if they don’t “stop” him somehow, presumably be derailing the Affordable Care Act. Christian conservatives such as Ellis Washington are running around telling each other that the ACA  will lead to “the systematic genocide of the weak, minorities, enfeebled, the elderly and political enemies of the God-state.” Twenty percent of Republicans believe Obama is the Antichrist.Washington Times columnist Jeffrey Kuhner argued that Obama is using his signature health care legislation to promote “the destruction of the family, Christian culture”, and demanded that Christians “need to engage in peaceful civil disobedience against President Obama’s signature health care law”.

The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops joined in, demanding that the Republicans shut down the government rather than let Obamacare go into effect. The excuse was their objection to the requirement that insurance make contraception available without a copayment, saying ending this requirement matters more than “serving their own employees or the neediest Americans.”

The Christian right media has been hammering home the message that Christians should oppose the Affordable Care Act. Pat Necerato of the Christian News Network accused the supporters of the law of committing idolatry and accused people who want health care of being covetous. The Christian Post approvingly reported various Christian leaders, including Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council, saying things like the health care law is “a profound attack on our liberties” and lamented “Today is the day I will tell my grandchildren about when they ask me what happened to freedom in America.”

Some in the Christian right straight up believe Obamacare portends the end times. Rick Phillips, writing for Christianity.com, hinted that Obamacare might be predicted in Revelations, though he held back from saying that was certain. Others are less cautious. On the right wing fundamentalist email underground, a conspiracy theory has arisen claiming that Obamacare will require all citizens to have a microchip implanted. While it’s completely untrue, many Christians believe that this means the “mark of the beast” predicted in Revelations that portends the return of Christ and the end of the world.

In other words, the Christian right has worked itself into a frenzy of believing that if this health care law is implemented fully, then we are, in fact, facing down either the end of American Christianity itself or quite possibly the end times themselves. In comparison, it’s hard to be too scared by the worldwide financial collapse that they’re promising to unleash if the Democrats don’t just give up their power and let Republicans do what they want. Sure, crashing stock markets, soaring unemployment, and worldwide economic depression sounds bad, but for the Christian right, the alternative is fire and brimstone and God unleashing all sorts of hell on the world.

This is a problem that extends beyond just the immediate manufactured crisis. The Christian right has become the primary vehicle in American politics for minimizing the problems of the real world while inventing imaginary problems as distractions. Witness, for instance, the way that fundamentalist Christianity has been harnessed to promote the notion that climate change isn’t a real problem. Average global temperatures are creeping up, but the majority of Christian conservatives are too worried about the supposed existential threats of abortion and gay rights to care.

Under the circumstances, it’s no surprise that it’s easy for Christian conservatives to worry more about imaginary threats from Obamacare than it is for them to worry about the very real threat to worldwide economic stability if the go along with their harebrained scheme of forcing the government into default. To make it worse, many have convinced themselves that it’s their opponents who are deluded. Take right wing Christian Senator Tom Coburn, who celebrated the possibility of default back in January by saying it would be a “wonderful experiment”. Being able to blow past all the advice of experts just to make stuff up you want to believe isn’t a quality that is unique to fundamentalists, but as these budget negotiations are making clear, they do have a uniquely strong ability to lie to themselves about what is and isn’t a real danger to themselves and to the world.

Amanda Marcotte is a Brooklyn-based freelance writer and journalist. She’s published two books and blogs regularly at Pandagon, RH Reality Check and Slate’s Double X. More Amanda Marcotte.

Dispelling the myth of a ‘Christian nation’

Charles C. Haynes

Culture warriors, pseudo-historians and opportunistic politicians have spent the last several decades peddling the myth that America was founded as a “Christian nation.”

The propaganda appears to be working.

A majority of the American people (51%) believes that the U.S. Constitution establishes a Christian nation, according to the State of the First Amendment survey released last month by the First Amendment Center.

Because language about a Christian America has long been a staple of Religious Right rhetoric, it’s not surprising that acceptance of this patently false interpretation of the Constitution is strongest among evangelicals (71%) and conservatives (67%).

But even many non-evangelical Christians (47%) and liberals (33%) appear to believe the fiction of a constitutionally mandated Christian America is historical fact.

Forgive me for being snippy, but read the Constitution.

Nowhere will you find mention of God, Christ or any intention to found a Christian nation.

On the contrary, the only reference to religion in the Constitution – before the addition of the Bill of Rights – comes in Article VI:

“No religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.”

This means that political power in the United States may never be limited to people of one faith – a necessary condition for a “Christian nation” – but must be open to people of all faiths or none.

Barring a religious test for office sparked widespread outrage in 1787, especially in states with religious tests designed to make sure that only Protestants or Christians would ever be allowed to hold elected office.

But in their wisdom, the Framers in Philadelphia knew that the time had come to break from the precedents of history and bar any religious group from ever imposing itself on the nation using the engine of government.

Even this wasn’t good enough for Thomas Jefferson and other founders who wanted to prohibit any and all entanglement of government and religion in the new nation.

In 1791, the opening words of the First Amendment – “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof …” – were added to the Constitution, further ensuring a fully secular state with a guarantee of religious freedom for all.

Of course, some of the founders (not unlike some Americans today) worried that “no establishment” might lead to a breakdown in Christian values in American culture. Alexander Hamilton, for example, contemplated the creation of a “Christian Constitutional Society” to promote Christian virtues and principles among the people.

But in spite of this anxiety, drafters of the Constitution took the radical step of founding the first nation in history with no established religion.

Truth be told, they had little choice.

Religious divisions among the many Protestant sects in 18th century America were deep and abiding. Anglicans, Quakers, Baptists, Congregationalists and many others fought bitterly over what it meant to be “Christian” – although almost all could agree that “Papists” (Roman Catholics) were followers of the anti-Christ.

In other words, religious diversity at America’s founding made a necessity of religious freedom because no one group had the power or the numbers to impose its version of true faith – Christian or otherwise – on all others.

It is worth remembering, however, that principles as much as practical politics inspired many of our founders to define religious freedom as requiring no establishment of religion.

Roger Williams, to cite the earliest and best example, founded the colony of Rhode Island in 1636 out of his conviction that only by erecting a “wall or hedge of separation” between the “garden of the church” and “the wilderness of the world” would it be possible to protect liberty of conscience as required by God.

Religious freedom, Williams argued, is itself a Christian principle.

Any attempt to establish a Christian nation, therefore, always has been and always will be unjust, dangerous and profoundly un-Christian.