Monthly Archive for September, 2009Page 2 of 99

DC Voucher Program is Unconstitutional

Published
by
Jesse Galef
on September 30, 2009
.

When the details and effects of the DC Voucher Program are examined, there should be no question that should be considered an unconstitutional violation of the separation of church and state.  I’m not addressing the program’s efficacy or effect on public schools – others can debate that – but regardless, it is an affront to religious liberty and the nonreligious community.

Since commenters seem skeptical, I’ll explain, laying out the case I used in my debate last night.

Nobody should be taxed to pay for another person’s religious training, nor should the government encourage certain religious practices over others.

In a 5-4 decision in Zelman v. Simmons Harris, the Supreme Court narrowly found the particular voucher program in Ohio to be constitutional.  But it did so specially mentioning the importance of requirements and provisions in the Ohio program – provisions that are absent in the DC program.

The first difference is a familiar problem.  Unlike the Ohio voucher program, which prohibits participating schools from discriminating, the DC program has a specific exemption for religious schools participating in the vouchers.  They are allowed to discriminate in their hiring on the basis of religion, meaning that teachers’ access to federal money is affected by their religious affiliation.  This should sound familiar – it’s the biggest ongoing controversy with the Faith-Based Initiative program.

“Current voucher policies… essentially push students into Christian Association and Catholic schools, pricing out independent (non-religious) schools and Hebrew Schools”

Another key difference is that, unlike the Ohio Voucher program, the DC Voucher Program gives parents incentives to choose religious schools. In Zelman, the Supreme Court wrote that such programs could not have “financial incentives that skew the program towards religious schools.”  They found that the Ohio program accomplished this by requiring a copay and capping the cost. In their program, private secular and private religious schools would cost the same for these students, and each would cost more than the public, non-sectarian schools.

DC Vouchers are different.  There’s no copay, and the government will give a set maximum of $7,500.  That’s conveniently enough to cover the whole tuition for most private religious schools – but not private secular schools.  A Rutgers study that came out in July 2009 found that the average cost of religious schools was about $7,700 per child.  The cost for secular schools was twice as high.  They concluded that the difference has

“clear implications for voucher programs, since current voucher policies are funded at amounts that cover costs at only a select subset of private schools. They essentially push students into Christian Association and Catholic schools, pricing out independent (non-religious) schools and Hebrew schools.”

The program is focused on low-income families in bad neighborhoods.  Offering $7,500 towards private school doesn’t mean the parents can choose any school they want – it means parents can choose any religious school they want.  They can’t afford to pay the additional seven or eight thousand dollars.

It is fundamental to the separation of church and state that government should never encourage or endorse certain religious practices over others. And the DC Voucher Program does just that, encouraging parents to send their children to religious schools and receive religious educations.

We might hope that the money would only be going toward a secular education.  But many religious schools receiving money through the program don’t even make an effort to separate out their sectarian religious teachings.

For example, the Ambassador Baptist Church Christian School (quite a name, huh?) website states that its “primary mission and goal is to train the students in the knowledge of God and the Christian way of Life and to provide them with an excellent educational experience…. God’s truth is infused throughout the curriculum and is reinforced in chapel each week.”

Now, I heard testimony in the Senate Office Building yesterday that the Ambassador Baptist Church Christian School is no longer getting voucher money. Could it be because they were using my tax money to promote religion and indoctrinate children?  No, the school had financial problems. I don’t know the details of their financial problems, but apparently the program had no problem with over 50 students receiving federal money to be “trained in the knowledge of God and the Christian way of Life.”

It’s not an isolated case. New Macedonia Christian Academy boasts about delivering “a high quality Christian education to our students while instilling a strong Christ-centered academic foundation.”  The Dupont Park School encourages “each student to develop a personal relationship with God” and strives to “prepar[e] students for the service of God’s Church, Country, Community and above all for Eternity.”

The program has no problem with over 50 students receiving federal money to be “trained in the knowledge of God and the Christian way of Life.”

What is this if not religious instruction?  As the Supreme Court said in Everson vs. Board of Education,“No tax in any amount, large or small, can be levied to support any religious activities or institutions, whatever they may be called, or whatever from they may adopt, to teach or practice religion.”

Now, that outrages me as a taxpayer. But it’s also children who are being harmed.  Unlike the Wisconsin Voucher program, the DC program has no required “opt-out” option for students who wish not to participate in the religious activities. Students are priced into religious schools where they have no guarantee that they won’t be proselytized.

And it’s happening.  The 2008 US Department of Education Report found that, when students leaving the program were asked why they left, 8% said that “religious activities at the private school make the child uncomfortable”. I find that number to be remarkable, and it doesn’t tell us how many children are put into uncomfortable religious situations but don’t leave the program.

Nonreligious Americans are a growing population, and the American Religious Identification Survey report that came out this month found that 18% of DC residents are not affiliated with a religion. How are they supposed to participate in the DC Voucher program? The way pricing is arranged, they can only afford to choose religious schools, but what if they don’t want to be surrounded by a religious climate and receive a ‘christ-centered’ education?

We need to end this program. It misuses taxpayer dollars on religious education and discrimination, it encourages certain religious practices over others, and it puts parents and students into uncomfortable positions of choosing between their wallet and their freedom of conscience.

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I didn’t even know there was a reporter there!

Published
by
Pharyngula
on September 30, 2009
.

My appearance at Bates made it to the Lewiston Sun Journal.

They did get a little piece of one point I tried to make. I don't think religion makes people do wicked things, and that's not my gripe with it. What it does is cut an intellectual brake line, making them incapable of dealing with certain situations rationally — they may do what is right, or they may do something that's just nuts, but you just can't rely on them doing what is reasonable.

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That Dawkins guy gets all the cool gigs

Published
by
Pharyngula
on September 30, 2009
.

Richard Dawkins is appearing on Colbert tonight, it should be good. In a near miss, Francis Collins is appearing tomorrow; too bad we couldn't get a collision.

Read the comments on this post...

International Blasphemy Day

Published
by
Daniel Florien
on September 30, 2009
.

Today is International Blasphemy Day! Here is what it’s all about:

The objective of International Blasphemy Day is to open up all religious beliefs to the same level of free inquiry, discussion and criticism to which all other areas of academic interest are subjected.

Why September 30?  The last day in September is the anniversary of the original publication of Danish cartoons in 2005 depicting the prophet Muhammad’s face.  Any visual depiction of Muhammad is considered a grave offence under Islamic law.

The fury which arose within the Islamic community following this publication led to massive riots, attacks on foreign embassies and deaths.

The newspapers which chose to publish these cartoons were in many cases blamed for the outpouring of violence which followed.  This unfortunate yet inevitable sequence of events clearly demonstrated a dangerous misconception that had piggy-backed into the 21st century on the shoulders of ignorance, fear and apathy, that all religious beliefs and ideas deserve respect and are beyond criticism or satire.

International Blasphemy Day is a movement, not just a day, to remind the world that religion should never again be beyond open and honest discussion or reproach. Our future depends on it.

Sounds good to me. I blaspheme every day, so today is just as good as any. In celebration, I present you with this highly offensive and blasphemous picture of Muhammad, or at least that’s what I’m told.

muhammad-vi

Do you have any good blasphemies planned for today?

An entirely appropriate summary of Stephen Meyer’s talk in Oklahoma

Published
by
Pharyngula
on September 30, 2009
.

It was very simple: DIRP.

I knew ahead of time exactly what it was going to be: complexity, complexity, complexity, complexity, complexity, complexity, complexity, therefore, DESIGN. It doesn't follow. The logic is nonexistent. It's the kind of thing you'd expect a competent person with a Ph.D. in philosophy to recognize, but no, it's the same ol' thing, trotted out every time they get up to speak.

COMPLEXITY DOES NOT IMPLY DESIGN. You can build up an awesome mess of complexity by accident, so you need to demonstrate something other than complexity to demonstrate intent.

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God Smites Area Man For Distracting Him From Tree Frogs

Published
by
Daniel Florien
on September 30, 2009
.

Happy Blasphemy Day

Published
by
frank
on September 30, 2009
.

To commemorate Blasphemy Day, an Onion article from last year:  Evolutionists Flock To Darwin-Shaped Wall Stain

DAYTON, TN—A steady stream of devoted evolutionists continued to gather in this small Tennessee town today to witness what many believe is an image of Charles Darwin—author of The Origin Of Species and founder of the modern evolutionary movement—made manifest on a concrete wall in downtown Dayton.

“I brought my baby to touch the wall, so that the power of Darwin can purify her genetic makeup of undesirable inherited traits,” said Darlene Freiberg, one among a growing crowd assembled here to see the mysterious stain, which appeared last Monday on one side of the Rhea County Courthouse. The building was also the location of the famed “Scopes Monkey Trial” and is widely considered one of Darwinism’s holiest sites. “Forgive me, O Charles, for ever doubting your Divine Evolution. After seeing this miracle of limestone pigmentation with my own eyes, my faith in empirical reasoning will never again be tested.”

-snip-

Capitalizing on the influx of empirical believers, street vendors have sprung up across Dayton, selling evolutionary relics and artwork to the thousands of pilgrims waiting to catch a glimpse of the image. Available for sale are everything from small wooden shards alleged to be fragments of the “One True Beagle”—the research vessel on which Darwin made his legendary voyage to the Galapagos Islands—to lecture notes purportedly touched by English evolutionist Alfred Russel Wallace.

-snip-

And the best of all:

“It’s a stain on a wall, and nothing more,” said the Rev. Clement McCoy, a professor at Oral Roberts University and prominent opponent of evolutionary theory. “Anything else is the delusional fantasy of a fanatical evolutionist mindset that sees only what it wishes to see in the hopes of validating a baseless, illogical belief system. I only hope these heretics see the error of their ways before our Most Powerful God smites them all in His vengeance.”

Columnist Supports Banned Books Week; Illinois Family Institute Objects

Published
by
Hemant Mehta
on September 30, 2009
.

A few days ago, the Chicago Tribune’s Pulitzer Prize-winning cultural critic Julia Keller spoke out in favor of Banned Books Week:

That day marked my first encounter with banned books.

I probably don’t need to point out that my mother’s efforts were utterly counter-productive, that her prohibition only made true-crime books seem even more alluring. Human nature, for all of its rumored complexity, is a simple thing: Tell us we can’t have something and we suddenly want it more than we’ve ever wanted anything else in our lives. Put something out of our reach and we grope and strain and pant for it with all of our might.

…

The groups that keep Banned Books Week front and center want to remind us that freedom of reading, like freedom of speech, is crucial to a democracy. Books are worth fighting for. The release of the annual list of controversial books is a great opportunity to renew our commitment to unfettered access to books.

Books don’t kill people; people kill people. In other words, I didn’t become the ax murderer that my mother feared I might. And if I had, I don’t think we could’ve blamed the books…

Sounds reasonable. If I were a child, I’d be eager to find out what was so dangerous about a book that someone (i.e. probably a conservative Christian) wanted to keep it away from me.

So guess who’s all offended by this article?

Welcome back, Laurie Higgins. We missed you.

Higgins and the Illinois Family Institute issued a rebuttal to Keller’s piece. They don’t find anything wrong with censoring certain books from children.

Here’s what [Keller] fails to address:

  1. Ideas do, indeed, have consequences. Keller’s personal experience that reading about serial killers, ax murderers, and remorseless poisoners didn’t turn her into a murderer is lousy evidence for her unproven implicit claim that literature has no capacity to change people.
  2. Not every novel, play, essay, or short story is appropriate at every age.
  3. Books that never appear on the shelves of libraries, that is, books that the ALA’s de facto censorship protocols (aka “Collection Development Policies”) never allow to be purchased can’t be banned.
  4. Banning a book, or more accurately, making a book less easily accessible to children, may keep dangerous, destructive, deviant ideas and images out of the minds and hearts of children or delay the age at which they’re exposed to them.

Of course literature can change people. Keller of all people wouldn’t say otherwise. But a book alone isn’t going to turn you into a monster. There are always other factors in play. And to shield a child from every potentially damaging factor is to remove that child from the world itself.

Is every piece of writing appropriate for every age? Not necessarily. But no one should be making that decision for someone else’s children.

As for sheltering the children from harmful ideas, we’ll get to that later.

Higgins goes on to talk about “inappropriate” books assigned in school:

Keller seems to employ a red herring argument when she cites To Kill a Mockingbird and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn while, for example, ignoring a play like Angels in America that includes extraordinarily obscene language and graphic sex and whose author Tony Kushner displays some rather virulent anti-religious sentiment.

She makes it sound like some teacher forced that book upon his unsuspecting students. Not true at all.

Some backstory: An Illinois teacher was under attack from conservative groups when he assigned Angels in America last year. The lady leading the charge (*surprise*) once worked with IFI.

The teacher didn’t force the book upon the students and he gave them an option to read an alternative book (Camus’ The Stranger). In addition, parents had to “opt-in” to the play and sign a permission slip if they were allowing their children to read Angels in America.

This is what the teacher wrote in a letter to parents:

“If I have any agenda, it’s this: kindness and compassion are virtues to celebrate, forgiveness is always preferable to revenge, hope is powerful and lasting, and what we do for the greater good is what will define us and our legacy. If any work of literature can be demanding, complex, and nuanced in helping me express those values, then that is an exciting prospect. I believe that Angels in America is all of these things, and that, above all, is why I teach it.”

How dare he…?

(And what’s with Higgins attacking Kushner’s religious beliefs? An atheist wrote a book, therefore it should be banned?)

Higgins finally gets to the part you know she’s been waiting to get to — The Homosexuals:

In addition, [Keller] fails to acknowledge that many of the most frequently challenged books are ones that affirm controversial ideas about homosexuality, and that many of those are picture books intended for very young audiences. The frequently challenged books Heather Has Two Mommies and King and King embody unproven ontological and moral claims that many parents consider radical, subversive, and perverse. The implicit claims are far too abstract and complex for the very young audience for whom these picture books are intended, which leaves just squishy, emotional non-arguments to shape the feelings of young children. I think this could reasonably be called propaganda.

You know what Heather learns in that book?

She learns that “the most important thing about a family is that all the people in it love each other.”

Damn radical, subversive, perverse propaganda…

And then, as she’s done before, Higgins goes down the slippery slope and brings in false analogies (like racial superiority and paraphilias):

The epithet “book banner” is hurled at conservative parents as a tactic to humiliate them into silence. Would parents who object to picture books that explore the sorrow of children who have been deliberately created as motherless or fatherless children be called book banners? Would parents who object to picture books that affirm polyamory be considered book banners? Would parents who object to public school teachers enthusiastically and positively teaching a play that affirms and celebrates racial superiority be considered book banners? Would parents who object to public school teachers teaching a novel that graphically depicts and celebrates paraphilias as normal variations of sexual practice be considered book banners? Would parents who object to the teaching of a book whose author attacks or ridicules Orthodox Judaism or Islam be considered book banners?

Of course, no teacher is encouraging racial superiority or celebrating paraphilia. Just because a book discusses those ideas in a certain way doesn’t mean it’s an endorsement of said ideas. (And what the hell is wrong with affirming polyamory?)

We can argue over the phrase “book banner.” Maybe “book denier” is better.

The problem I have with Higgins throughout her piece is that she and IFI are not simply concerned with what their own children read.

Their goal is to control what your children read. If they’re offended by it, then they don’t want your kids exposed to it. That’s why we raise a fuss. And that’s why we should be embracing Banned Books Week. Parents have a right to control what their children should read (key word: THEIR). I would hope they don’t censor anything, but it’s each parent’s decision.

And smarter children will find their way around the barriers surrounding them. Children, with their almost unlimited sense of curiosity, ought to read books they think are interesting. If someone else is trying to stop you from doing it, it’s all the more reason to find out why that is. (Want some advice? Try Judy Blume. She’s fantastic.)

I do agree with Higgins when she implies that parents should be concerned with what their own children read.

The way to handle that, though, is not by censoring their kids from tackling controversial subjects. Let your children read what they want. But keep an eye on what books they choose. Read it yourself, if you can. Discuss the subject matter with them. Don’t let the book be the last word on the topic.

You know, If IFI were truly concerned about children being exposed to violent imagery, graphic sexuality, and complete fabrications about the world around us, then they would focus on banning the Bible.

When they get around to that, maybe I’ll take their other concerns more seriously.

…

Julie Clawson, a Christian, has a few thoughts about Banned Books Week and how it relates to her faith:

There’s good reason why people lose their faith in college -– when confronted with the messiness of religion, or theology, or textual studies their sheltered minds are taken by surprise and they feel lied to and betrayed by the church that did it’s best to keep them from encountering reality. But some still think it’s better (or at least easier) to pretend than to deal with the messiness that is reality. Instead of wrestling with church history or helping our kids respond with love to all the people they encounter, the very discussion gets banned. So kudos to Banned Books Week for forcing us to face those fears instead of hiding from them. For not letting ideologies be used as silencing weapons of oppression.


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My Thoughts On Blasphemy Day

Published
by
Daniel Fincke
on September 30, 2009
.

So today is “Blasphemy Day.”  Here’s what it’s about:

Blasphemy Day International is an international campaign seeking to establish September 30th as a national day to promote free speech and stand up in a show of solidarity for the freedom to mock and insult religion without fear of murder, violence, and reprisal. It is the obligation of the world’s nations to safeguard dissent and the dissenters, not to side with the brutal interests of thugs who demand “respect” for their beliefs (i.e., immunity to being criticized or mocked or they threaten violence).

So if you support free speech, and the rights of those who disagree with religious views to voice their opinions peacefully, support our group and join the cause!

(via Pharyngula)

I am of three  minds on the topic of Blasphemy Day.  I am not really a deliberate blasphemer by temperament.  Of course I enjoy a good sacrilegious joke as much as any non-fundamentalist with a sense of humor does.  I enjoy ridiculing what is ridiculous in absurd beliefs.  But I do not and typically have no desire to go out of my way to denigrate religious symbols or texts or phrases for the sake of causing offense itself.  I am happy to express my reasons against religious ideas and institutions in a vigorous and scathing way which spares no rhetorical flourish, as long as I am saying what I really think.  I am happy to post videos that have sharp, funny satire that makes important points.

But blaspheming in the sense of saying things which somehow curse revered religious figures or texts rather than make a philosophical case against them or a genuinely funny joke at their expense?  That’s not my style.  And for ethical reasons: it’s rude, it’s obnoxious, it’s disrespectful to people who care about those things.  The reasons why they care about them may be problematic, but they care nonetheless.  And it’s some sort of combination of self-centered, cruel, insensitive, arrogant, impolite, and tactless to go out of one’s way to denigrate things people care about just to insult them.

If there is a philosophical point at stake and stressing that God is an “imaginary friend for grown ups” or something, then that’s fair game.  Part of argumentation is to challenge received attitudes by forcing people to reconsider something they improperly revere and demonstrate irreverence towards it as a way of trying to combat the spell it has on someone.  A philosophical mentor of mine is in the habit of referring to Nietzsche, my philosophical obsession for many years, in denigrating terms or dismisively as “dear old Fred.”  Why?  I think it’s because it was a way of sending a message to me that he’s not to be taken too seriously.  Because no one is to be taken too seriously.  And because I’ve spent years studying Nietzsche and writing a dissertation that spends several chapters explicating him.  And, more importantly, I and others who study Nietzsche can sometimes be tempted to elevate him into an unquestionable authority—or at least to quote him as though his voice did have a superior authority beyond his ideas’ abilities to stand up to vigorous questioning.

Now, I’ve never worshipped Nietzsche and I freely and unhesitatingly disagree with him on various points.  And even when I was in the phase of citing him as though his ideas were authoritative just for being Nietzsche’s ideas, I knew all along that it wasn’t because the great and hallowed intellectual giant must be right on anything about which he writes.  What I was doing was being a good scholar and immersing myself in his thought so that I could understand it as well as possible.

By frequently and reflexively putting on the Nietzsche glasses and trying to assess everything in his terms for several years, I was not ceding my rights to disagree, but rather I was trying to understand what there might be to learn by trying not to disagree.  I was trying to figure out the best possibilities for reading him, the maximum possible insights that might be in his texts if we try to reason out how they could answer what might seem prima facie like devastating objections.  The goal was not to subsume my thought forever in his but to learn to think like him as much as possible so that I could then ascertain his insights as much as possible and then make decisions about where I disagreed with him that I could feel completely confident in.

Like with my former Evangelical Christianity, I can say of Nietzsche that when I disagree, it’s not because I am dismissing a caricature of something I do not understand.  I lived, ate, breathed, and slept Evangelical Christianity from the time I was 5 until I was 21 and then I lived, ate, breathed, and slept Nietzsche from 21 to 31.  There is so much understanding possible only through this method.  Throughout the Nietzsche years many of my Nietzschean attitudes were only hypothetical—as much as I’d argue for them academically, I would also privately argue for things I knew were at cross-purposes with Nietzsche.

And finally, as my dissertation started to reach its final phases, in my final chapter, after years of zealous advocacy for Nietzsche, I settled into the phase of being ready to criticize and to do so with no compunction.  I readily was able to say, I just think he’s wrong here and wrong there and that in my own philosophy I have to part ways with him and move on from him.  I think I have benefitted an immense amount from living with Nietzsche the last ten years of my life and I am extremely happy with the ways that he has infused my perspective with irreplaceable insights.  I look forward to teaching him to students for the rest of my career and to mining his works for a myriad of insights I still have not discovered even in 10 years of intensive concentration on him.  I still find debates within Nietzsche scholarship  about how to interpret him fascinating and still have a whole career of making what I’ve already developed in my dissertation public ahead of me.  So, I’m not done with Nietzsche by any stretch.  He’s been a terrific influence and I still want to refine and publish all I’ve learned about what he has to offer.

But, now he’s no longer Nietzsche to me but, in many ways, “dear old Fred.”  And that’s a vital and important thing.  Because, as Nietzsche himself writes in the “On The Bestowing Virtue” section of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, “One repays a teacher badly if one remains only a pupil.”

And it was surprisingly helpful to me mentally to have that towering, bullying mind of Nietzsche dismissed as just the mind of “dear old Fred.”  The mockery of my own seriousness about Nietzsche was important for me to enter the stage of pulling me out of my immersion stage and making possible my shift into criticism.  It was important for me to “break my revering heart” (”On The Famous Wise Men,” Thus Spoke Zarathustra) as the first step towards truthfulness about Nietzsche’s shortcomings.

And it is in this spirit that I am for blasphemy.  Our revering hearts are obstacles to truth.  They are barriers to necessary criticism.  And far worse than just falling under the spell of a great mind for a season is worshipping a man, a god, a tradition, a phrase, a symbol—an anything.  Worship is inherently unhealthy.  It’s a dangerous lack of restraint in one’s allegiances and affections.  It’s a surrender of one’s critical faculties.  And reverence which reaches that point deserves challenge.  It may be unpleasant to those challenged, but if one is to engage the ideas of those who worship, one must challenge their revering wills.  Bowing deferently to their altars may be politeness and civility when a guest in their houses of worship, but in the public sphere and in the contests of ideas one’s refusal to bow can serve a constructive purpose of demonstrating your defiance of what some of the religious want to consider holy over all else.

And Christianity and Islam, by their natures, have strong tendencies to want to spread their attitudes about what is to be taken as holy everywhere.  And when we are too cautious about never incurring on their boundaries of sacredness, we de facto acknowledge a sacredness.  We too treat what they insist is to be “set apart” as though it really is worth being “set apart” when we defer and agree never to treat it disrespectfully as we would any other merely human attachment.

There’s no point in being deliberately rude and obnoxious.  You’re never going to see me flout the Catholic church by addressing a priest with whom I’m not on a first name basis as anything but Father.  Because whatever my philosophical and moral disagreements, it’s a simple matter of respect for a different tradition.  Insofar as religion is about more than people’s beliefs but also their cultures, we should be respectful of people’s places in their traditions as we are of the leaders of foreign countries.  And we should respect people’s religious morally harmless rituals the way we respect a foreign culture’s customs which diverge from our own.  We should also challenge their abuses of rituals to harm others in morally bad ways and we should heap scorn and ethical challenge on outright immoral rituals and traditions.  And we should disagree vigorously with bad ideas and give them no special respect for just being traditional religious beliefs.

So these are where I think the boundaries should be drawn.  Respecting morally indifferent rituals, traditions, titles, etc., are all matters of respecting cultures.  Challenging morally questionable rituals, traditions, titles, etc. is a matter of exercising our own moral conscience and our right to make moral arguments in a community of open discourse about moral issues.  Challenging philosophically questionable ideas is a matter of exercising our intellectual conscience and advocating on behalf of the truth as best we can judge it.

Where does blasphemy come in as any good in light of these considerations?  When religions agitate to try to silence all moral and intellectual criticisms of their practices?  Religions need to be adamantly and unqualifiedly denied such a desire.  They have no entitlement to demand others treat their teachings as irreproachable.  Their leaders and their traditions are not beyond criticism from outside.  They are not entitled to any special rights outside the confines of their tradition which confers such rights on them for voluntary community members.  They are  not morally entitled to threaten or use violence to protest vigorous intellectual, moral, and political challenge.  They are not morally entitled to write laws that take away our rights to be rude to each other.  Should we be obnoxious and insult people’s reverences capriciously?  Ethically no.  But politically this should be as inalienable a right as people’s rights to have such reverences.  You must have the right to worship whomever you want and I must have the right to laugh at you in whatever manner I want.  That’s the deal.  That’s fairness.

And so Blasphemy Day is an assertion of that right.  That right of the secularists to insist that our freedom of private expression of our disbelief and/or disdain for superstition and irrational traditionalism is as inviolable as your right to have fantastic, unverifiable beliefs.  Both rights end when they threaten to eradicate each other.  Both rights end should they involve violence (or palpably harm children—I’m looking at you child-killing faith “healers”) or the co-option of state apparatuses to enforce either public belief or private disbelief.

And since there is a disquieting tendency throughout the world to start to protect religious people from criticism or to defer to religious threats of violence as respectable and worth honoring, it is important that secularists stand up explicitly for our right to do things that religious people do not like.  Usually it should not come to gratuitous blasphemy.  But if even our morally, politically, and intellectually defensible arguments will be met with threats of violence as “blasphemy” then we must assert our rights not only to such reasonable discourse but even to legitimate instances of blasphemy.  We cannot back down and promise only to criticize moderately and politely if we are being bullied when we are trying to be rational with irrational, violent people.  The very notion that they can restrict our speech is an affront to our rights of free expression and to disbelief.

And so actual blasphemy which would be rude and gratuitous normally becomes an important politically symbolic gesture of our right to offend in general.  Normally I for one have no intention of offending anyone.  I am in the rational persuasion business.  I’d happily never offend anyone.  But I am willing to run the risk that people will be offended by strong opinions presented with rhetorical force.  And when that happens, it’s not my fault.  Affirming this right to offend by accident most clearly involves affirming the right to offend even deliberately.  It’s affirming offense itself as politically legitimate speech.

And, of course, normally non-aggressive sacrilege and good humored mockery are important means for helping break the spell of the instinct to worship and to start to see their overhyped religious leaders as “dear old Ben” or “dear old Mo” the way that, much as I love him, Nietzsche has to be “dear old Fred.”

So, for these reasons, while I do not endorse gratuitous blasphemy and while technically blasphemy is a victimless crime since there is no God to actually offend, I support respecting people’s traditions and reverences as part of how they construct their identities.  I do not support respecting them as ideas and practices insofar as they are bad ideas or practices deserving refutation.  In the battle of ideas we should not give them any special deference they do not earn through argument.  But we should be respectful insofar as they are indifferent parts of people’s habits and customs.  The only, but nonetheless vital, reasons to go out of our way to deliberately offend such rituals and customs and sacred figures are to assert our rights not to treat them as holy and set apart, our rights to offend whether accidentally or on purpose, and our rights to criticize religious ideas and institutions as vigorously as we may any other ideas or institutions.

Blasphemy Day is worthy of being deemed a holiday if you believe that free speech is sacred. Blasphemy and dissent against governmental authority are the two most quintessential acts of free speech available to us since it is religious and political authorities alone from whom anyone has ever had to worry about coercion against the right of free speech.  So if we believe that ultimately nothing is sacred except free speech itself (as Pat Condell argues below) then the only true holy day on the calendar is the day in which you celebrate free speech itself by exercising it in defiance of those forces of authoritarianism who blaspheme against freedom by inventing the concept of a blasphemy in the first place.

But, since I’m not really the type to go be disrespectful, even for the purposes of a holiday, I’ll have to leave it to one of the grand masters of disrespect to religion in the name of political freedom, Pat Condell himself:

Finally, Friendly Atheist has important information about efforts to challenge Ireland’s recently enacted blasphemy law and how people can help out.  I encourage you to read up and take seriously this threat to free speech.

Your Thoughts?

Posted in Applied Ethics, Atheism, Civil Liberties, Cultural Secularism, Free Speech, Law, Nietzsche, Political Secularism, Politics, Secularism, Separation of Church and State Tagged: Blasphemy, Friendly Atheist, Pat Condell, Pharyngula

Stuff Evangelicals Like

Published
by
Daniel Fincke
on September 30, 2009
.

In the spirit of the sensation Stuff White People Like, comes Stuff Christian Culture Likes which is written by a PK who married a PK.  And boy an embarrassing lot of these really take me back.  It’s eerie how on target they are.  And it’s weird to see some of the newer stuff since I left that whole culture behind 10 years ago:

Ahh, all the hating on the Catholics, considering them not saved.  I personally remember being 18, in my first week away at college writing letters to some 14 year olds I was “discipling” in the faith and answering one of their questions about whether all Catholics weren’t saved.  Even as hardcore Evangelical as I was I couldn’t get my mind around the idea that God would start his church and then let it become a false church for, like, 1500 years until Martin Luther came around.  It was just silliness.  Here they offer an Evangelical attempt to wittily cut down Catholics that just has Fail written all over it:

BURN!  Take that silly Catholics and your unwillingness to acknowledge God’s sovereignty!!

I can actually even top this one—I actually saw this with a Sunday School class in the theater when it was new and the line was unexpected. It was my mom’s class teaching 6-7 year olds and I was 9 and she had me along as a helper. And when Inigo Montoya called the Six-Fingered Man a son of a bitch, my mom was hilarious as she immediately went to work indicating to the kids that they were not to tell their parents about that. We all found it really funny though, Mom included.

Christian items marketed to teens usually use an “extreme,” “edgy” or “grunge” font. Like teenagers will not respond to your basic Helvetica.

This is a game where everyone starts horfing marshmallows and whoever can enunciate the words “chubby bunny” with the most marshmallows crammed in their mouth is the winner. It was played at every church retreat, bible camp, and youth group event ever and then someone somewhere died from choking during Chubby Bunny and the church insurance won’t let you play it anymore.

  • #32 Formulas
  • #31 Astroglide
  • #30 Chick-Fil-A
  • #29 John Calvin
  • Talking about John Calvin makes many Christians feel sophisticated and avant-garde. Theology students who begin required reading of Calvin fall in love with him and his four (sometimes five) spiritual laws. They volley big words back and forth and go to Starbucks to discuss things like “limited atonement” and “perseverance of the saints.” Ardent debates are spawned over the issue of predestination and absolutely no conclusion is reached. This is a great deal of fun for them, and yet it can all take an ominous turn if someone is not in agreement with you on how the word “total” in “total depravity” should be interpreted.It is plausible, but not scientifically confirmed, that reformed students spend more time studying Calvin’s teachings than they spend studying Scripture. Weirdly enough, this may mean they’ve crossed from Gospel into Law (uh oh), but we’ll never know for sure. Kind of like predestination.

Yeah, that one hits home.  That’s my freshman year in a nutshell.

1. The youth group leader tries to present himself as hip. This usually means the he will cultivate one or all of the following: a goatee, soul patch, fauxhawk, ear or eyebrow piercing (but only on the coasts; never ever in the midwest or the Bible belt lest the church leadership thinks he might be gay). He will sometimes sculpt his hair into the Joey Tribiani front-swoop that was popular in the mainstream around 1997. Whichever look he is going for, it will involve hair gel unless he is prematurely balding, in which event he will opt for the shaved head/goatee combo.

Photobucket

2. If the youth pastor is in his late 20s or older, he often will forego trying to be hip and will endeavor to present himself as zany. This usually means there is a ‘goofy’ picture of him on the church website with ‘wacky’ quotes about his favorite ice cream flavor and favorite movie (never anything rated R). Everything he says on the website is summarized with an “on a serious note” moment where the youth pastor reiterates his desire to glorify God in everything he does.

There are four more identifiers of the youth minister and they’re all spot on.

(H/T Mojoey)

Your Thoughts?

Posted in Christianity, Religulous, Roman Catholic Church Tagged: Evangelicalism, Evangelicals, Mojoey, Stuff Christian Culture Likes

Does private property facilitate sexual harassment?

Published
by
Db0
on September 30, 2009
.
Sexual harassment
Image via Wikipedia

It seems that the Walter Block quote on sexual harassment I posted a while back has been rediscovered by various libertarians online and  lots of criticism, analysis and defenses (of PP not Block) have been written about it. It appears as even Walter Block himself appeared on the scene to distance himself from his own words.

However, the issue here is not as simple as merely saying that Block made a flawed logical reasoning, or that it was all a mistake or anything as simple as that. The quote above is simply a pointed example of the intellectual dead-end one reaches when his whole ethical framework resolves around respect for Private Property and fetishism of  voluntarism.

The issue here is that what Block wrote, unfortunately is a logical conclusion of suggesting voluntarism and the non-aggression principle within a propertarian environment as the core of ethics. It is, unfortunately consistent with “Anarcho”-Capitalist principles.

Most defenses of Private property I’ve seen (for an example, see the No Third Solution argument) orbit around the concept that harassment is prevented by the Non-Aggression principle and the lack of an explicit contract to allow it to happen. In short they consider the problem to be simply one of a contractual nature. They miss the elephant in the room by looking at the murals.

You see, there’s basically two arguments put forth here. So lets look at them in turn

“The Problem is not that the boss is harassing the secretary, but that he is harassing her without having an explicit clause in their employment contract allowing him to do so.”

This argument in short suggests that there is nothing wrong with a boss who only hires secretaries as a personal semi-harem, as long as he makes that known from the start. It assumes then that any secretary which agrees to this contract cannot then consider the sexual advances she agreed to, to be harassment.

This argument, while on the surface seems legit, is not in fact any more different than Block’s. It simply moves the agreement of the secretary from the implicit to the explicit. Whereas block asserted that the secretary’s continuous acceptance of the sexual harassment (i.e. not quitting her job over it) was an implicit agreement to it and thus not “harassment”, the contractual argument simply desires to take the same exact situation and legitimize it via the legal stamp.

However this argument misses the point that in both cases, the implicit or explicit acceptance of the harassment from the secretary is not caused because she wants it but because of the lack of alternatives. Because the other choices that remain to her if she does not accept the harassment or sign the contract are worse (ex starvation of her and her family.) The same secretary which “volunteered” to be harassed without a contract in Block’s example will also “volunteer” to sign the contract. Does the nature of her harassment change because she signed a piece of paper? Does the moral condemnation the boss deserves for abusing his position disappear?

Of course not, because the moral condemnation does not spring from the “aggression” the boss performs against the secretary but from the fact that he is using his position of power, which stems from inequality of wealth, to passively coerce the secretary to accept behaviour she would not otherwise accept if she was on equal standing.

The second problem which logically follows from the propertarian system is this:

“The boss can initiate a sexual advance towards the secretary who is at all liberty to refuse. However the boss then is at all liberty to fire her and there is nothing at all wrong with this.”

I believe that this is even more tricky for propertarians to defend. If we assume that the boss would not go straight to pinching (which the right-”libertarians” can then jump to label as “aggression”) but would initially “test the waters” so to speak by starting with subtle advancement and then growing bolder the more such advancements are accepted we end up exactly in the original Blockean argument once more.

Let’s say that this Boss does a subtle sexual advancement which the Secretary refuses. The Boss then fires her (terminating their “voluntary contract”). Next secretary? Same thing. And so on until he finds one secretary which is in a desperate enough situation that she tolerates his initial advances. He then becomes bolder and bolder until we reach the phase of pinching. Can we call that “aggression”? No since the secretary did not show outright refusal to such an advance and for the boss it can look like a normal progression of human relationship (or some other similar phrasing of his excuse). After all, the secretary is free at any point to make it clear that she does not appreciate his advances…and get fired.

In fact, the prudent “libertarian” boss, would not offer a sexual contract upfront to his potential secretaries but would rather follow the above actions until he’s determined that she’s desperate enough, and before moving on to actual physical contact, he would simply request that his secretary sign a new job contract volunteering to his sexual advances so as to legally cover his arse…just in case, you know.

Is there any way for Voluntarism and the NAP to morally condemn the actions of the boss? I fear not. And this again points out the intellectual bankruptcy of this ideology which cannot be covered by shallow “I was wrong to say that” excuses. The problem is that Block was not inconsistent with his ideology. He simply took it to his natural conclusion as he’s done with his acceptance of slave contracts. It just so happened that his argument struck a chord in the feminist movement who saw through the bankruptcy of voluntarism and forced him to backtrack hurriedly, even if he can’t explain the reasoning behind this.

Unlike vulgar-libertarians, a boss firing a secretary because she would not accept such a debasement is immediately a cause for moral condemnation by egalitarians[1] as we condemn all situations which passively coerce people to “volunteer” to such humiliation. It is the same reason why we condemn wage-slavery just as much as we condemn sexual harassment. The only difference between those two is that the latter has been taken out of the status of “normal” by the brave actions of the feminist movement while the former is still seen as something natural. But the underlying causes for one to “volunteer” to sexual harassment are exactly the same as what causes one to “volunteer” to wage slavery: Private Property.

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Insightful? Funny? Informative? Spot On? Helpful?

Notes
  1. Of course I maintain that one cannot be a consistent libertarian without being egalitarian as well but that’s beside the point
Other similar posts you might also enjoy: Just to remind you why Right-”libertarianism” is intellectually bankrupt | Why are you a Market Anarchist? | Private Property VS Possession

Blasphemy

Published
by
Felicia Gilljam
on September 30, 2009
.
Today is Blasphemy Day. I have no original blasphemy to contribute with, because all the clever things have already been said. Here’s a few samples.There’s plenty more, but I think more than three videos in one post would be overkill. By the way, isn’t it odd how all my favourite comedians seem to be atheists? Is [...]

Seems Cruel

Published
by
Ian
on September 30, 2009
.

cruel

Blasphemy Day

Published
by
Dave
on September 30, 2009
.

I've just found out (suppose I should have checked before) that today is International Blasphemy Day. The title of this post links to the site Blasphemy Day , which was set up to "open up all religious beliefs to the same level of free inquiry, discussion and criticism to which all other areas of academic interest are subjected." which is not only a noble cause but also gives us an extra excuse, as if one were needed, to ridicule beliefs held and proselytised without foundation in reality. Excellent.

The site makes no attempt to debate the existence or non-existence of Gods of any flavour, and makes it quite clear that such topics are well outside it's remit.


The reason that September 30th has been chosen for this day of blasphemy, is that it was on this day in 2005 that those infamous cartoons of Mohammed were published in the Danish Newspaper Jyllands-Posten. As a result of this, we found out just how fragile our values of 'free speech' and 'free expression' are here in Britain, as every single one of our newspapers declined to print any of the images, ostensibly for fear of causing offence, in reality for fear of having their windows broken by ramapaging mobs of hate-filled bigots, sorry, I mean peaceful and devout Muslims whose feelings were hurt by nasty cartoonists. I don't know about you, but if somebody hurts my feelings or criticizes something I hold dear, I don't feel the need to charge through the streets shouting, throwing stones and waving placards that say 'behead those who insult x' and 'butcher those who mock x'. Maybe I just don't have a highly enough developed sense of outrage.




So as mobs of  'offended' young men threatening obscene acts of violence paraded through the streets of Europe, waving their disgusting banners, shouting insults, throwing stones, spitting bile and showing us just how much Islam truly is 'the religion of peace', our political and religious leaders lined up in condemnation - of the cartoonists and the newspapers that dared to print them. I know it's a couple of years ago now but this case is so indicative of how our culture and our freedoms are being steadily eroded as we are forced to bend over backwards by our spineless political leaders, to accommodate a tiny minority of - lets not beat around the bush - infantile, ignorant, disgusting, hate-obsessed, violent, bigoted, misogynistic pricks, whose only way of coping with 'hurt feelings' are to get truly mouth-foamingly angry and take to the streets shouting insults and waving banners of such eye-watering evil and cruelty that we simply have no choice but to wring our hands and apologise profusely for upsetting them so much. Well, I would say, grow up you sad bastards and take a peak at the real World. Are you offended by this? Good. You don't just deserve to have your feelings hurt, you poor deluded little lambs, you deserve to have that disgusting, anti-human, uncivilized excrement you call the immutable word of God shoved so far down your throat that is makes you at least as half as sick as it makes me.

Now you  may feel I've stepped way over the line, I've insulted you, your holy book, the very tenets by which you claim to live your life, and of course that it is me who is being bigoted and hate-filled. I strongly suspect that the word 'Islamaphobe' has flashed across your consciousness several times, closely followed perhaps, if not preceded by, 'infidel', 'fatwa' and 'death threat'. You may even now be chalking up your banner and sharpening your scimitar in preperation for a march to show just how offended you are. Well, I'll be honest with you, I do hate you. I hate what you beleieve, and I hate what you stand for, but crucially, I don't want to kill you for it, and however much I dislike it, I have to accept that you have a right to believe it - can you say the same about me? I hope you'll change your mind, you'll grow up and see the real world, you'll see that beliefs founded in reality do not need violence to succeed, unless they are threatened by it, but I suspect it is too late for you, that you are so corrupted by hate and medieval bullshit that any chance of you using the mind that (you say) God gave you to actually think about this is lost. For this reason, I feel deeply sorry for you.
But of course Blasphemy day isn't just about the Muslims, it's about everyone who thinks their 'beliefs' should be above criticism (its' just that the Muslims are the only ones insecure enough to feel the need to threaten doubters with death) so without being gratuitously offensive, well not too much, here is my attempt at a little light-hearted blasphemy for each of the major faiths.

Judaism: Do you have any idea how ridiculous you look headbutting that silly wall? Do you really think God would make you his 'chosen people'? Why on Earth does God want you to have such ridiculously curly hair? Just what is God planning to do with that mountain of foreskins? Seems a bit daft that he would make you so perfectly in his image, then order you to cut off a bit of your knob.

Catholicism: Ah, a monotheism. With three Gods. Who are also one God. Mmm, you drink the blood of your God - if it really was blood and not just cheap plonk, do you have any idea how disgusting that would make you? Yes, a monotheism whose followers worship a pantheon of saints. Bit odd, eh? So hows that mile-high true cross coming along, have you collected all the splinters yet?

Greek and Russian Orthodox: - as above, just can't agree on the dates. Oh, and much nicer priestly outfits, those hats are great.

Protestantism - mainstream denominations: Catholics are wrong, of course, you got it right. So right that ther're literally thousands of different churches, all interpreting the 'word of God' differently. You'd think God would be a bit more careful when writing his truths, not to make them so ambiguous eh? Well who am I to judge, you're the experts...

Protestantism - evangelical denominations: Yes, thats right, the Bible is true, all true, ALL OF IT! Especially those bits that contradict each other, they're especially true. So, are you rapture ready? Its coming, you know, any day now. Any day. Any day now... Well, OK we're still waiting, but seriously, it is coming... any day...

Islam: I hardly need say anything, you're just a complete joke. A lethal joke, but funny none the less. Take a look at the images I've included to see just how incredibly funny you really are. So fucking funny that you make me puke.

Mormonism:  Oh no thats offensive isn't it? I mean Church of Jesus Christ of The Latter Day Saints: Well, the mind boggles, just reading the history of your 'religion' had me rolling in the aisles. A holy book dictated to an illiterate con-man (keep up people, I've done Islam already) telling the story of the lost tribe of Israel who somehow made it to the Americas. Gold-tabletted commandments that could only be seen by a convicted fraudster and magically disappeared into heaven afterwards... truly beyond satire. Thanks for helping me out with my genealogy research, by the way, but you need to go back through it again as you put one of my Carsberg relatives in the wrong family. I'd hate it if, come judgement day, God got all confused when reading your records and left my great great great grandfather in limbo.

Hinduism: Well take your pick, we've got a God for all occasions, and one of our holiest Gods is the one we drink from, bathe in, wash our clothes in, drain our sewerage in and of course scatter our dead in. Yummy.

Buddhism: Ah the ultimate path to enlightenment, the only way by which our essences may leave this mundane plane and escape the endless cycle of reincarnation. All you need to do is sit very still and think about it until you stop thinking about anything. And shave your head, of course, one cannot achieve spiritual enlightment with the weight of hair pressing down on you.

Sikhism: - The only path to God is to never cut your hair. What??

I think thats enough for now, as tempting as it is to rain down insults on the faithful, I'd hate to sink to their level of peurility, so I will close now by simply quoting from the Blasphemy Day website:

"Blasphemy Day, because your god is a joke."






The Atheist Bus Campaign

Published
by
Daniel Fincke
on September 30, 2009
.

This video is 8 months old and while the news isn’t as current, but there are great little discussions the bus ad’s genesis,the strategy in choosing its message, charges against atheists of militancy, and, finally, the question of why the religious so frequently take offense.

Posted in Atheism, Atheistic Ethics, Cultural Secularism, News Discussion, Religion, Secularism Tagged: "Militant Atheism", Ariane Sherine, Atheist Bus Ad, Atheist Bus Ad Campaign, England, Polly Toynbee, Richard Dawkins

Happy Blasphemy Day

Published
by
gonovelgo
on September 30, 2009
.

Today is Blasphemy Day! Hurrah, we know have a good reason to act immature about religion for a day while pretending we’re working for some sort of noble humanistic purpose.

All right, that came across as overly critical. Here’s the deal: I absolutely support people having the ability to commit blasphemy. Whether it’s to make a good point, a  bad point or no point at all, everybody should be allowed to do it in relation to whatever religion or deity they feel like – just as anybody should be allowed to insult and belittle the strongly-held beliefs of any political or special-interest group you care to name. I’ve said some pretty insulting things about homeopathy, crystal healing and the religious right in my time, after all.

So, I support the right to blaspheme. But would I condone it? Well, that depends…

You do not need to be deliberately insulting in order to make a point about religion. You do not need to be mocking or condescending in order to criticize even the most outlandish religious beliefs. Some people will always accuse any criticism of their religion on the grounds that it’s offensive or blasphemous, but here at least we can reply by pointing out that we weren’t trying to offend. If I speak my mind and somebody is outraged by it, that’s their problem. But if I set out to annoy them, if I find their figurative weak spots and exploit them solely for my own amusement…well, I’d find it a lot harder to justify my actions.

‘Blasphemy Day’ is a chance to point out that we atheists will not be silent just because we annoy some religious people. Theists take for granted their right to proselytize (in the USA and Europe, at any right) and refuse to be silenced when they get a negative reaction for it. We shouldn’t be knocking on people’s doors or shouting from street corners, but we should be able to speak our minds without fear of accidentally stepping on somebody’s fragile toes. We should be able to produce films, books and paintings that affront religious sensibilities without fear of censorship or even death. We should, in short, be confident of our right to offend, if offense is the inevitable outcome of saying what we believe to be true. It’s a right that should be shared by everybody, theist or atheist alike.

HAPPY BLASPHEMY DAY!

Published
by
Dr. Jim
on September 30, 2009
.

Its International Blasphemy Day in honour of freedom of speech!

GO GET STONED!

Why Sept. 30?

Because that’s when the first of the now famous Muhammad cartoons were published in the Danish newspaper, Jyllands-Posten. The resulting uproar resulted in estimates of the average I.Q. on this planet to be significantly lowered.

mohammedbombThere’s no point in going into the details, but since many Muslims took this so seriously and sometimes so violently, there has been a degree of self censorship of critiques of Islam that is simply appalling.

Even Yale University Press forbade reproduction of the images in a new book on the controversy.  A number of Islamic nations tried to get a binding anti-blasphemy resolution passed in the United Nations. They didn’t get the support to make it binding, so that’s a good thing.

virgins

The Thinking Shop has always operated under the motto “Fuck ‘em if they can’t take a cartoon”, so the deference of academic publishers, newspapers and so forth really grates on yours truly’s nerves.

DanishCartoon

What counts as blasphemy anyway? Certainly the content of some scriptures blasphemes the deities of other religions. Religious leaders often preach against the teachings of other religions as being silly, inspired by ignorance or the Devil or whatever. Why not protect the same rights to non-religious speech that is highly critical of religion and their assorted deities?

shivaburger

Its not as if there will be any kind of divine retribution. Blasphemy is, after all, a victimless crime. There is no god to fuck us up – - – OR IS THERE?

In many ways Christianity and its symbols takes a lot of abuse that wouldn’t be hurled at Islam. That’s not fair.

jesuscigarettesbeerSent to me by Dan  just as I was writing this post.

There should be an equal lack of restrictions on blaspheming any deity or satirizing, spoofing or generally insulting any religious (and non-religious) idea, symbol or object.

http://loltheist.com

http://loltheist.com

But what the hell? Let’s have some music!

Of course, there might be some who don’t really think this song is serious… alas.

http://loltheist.com

http://loltheist.com

Well, I should get back to marking papers. Your preferred diety damn it, I hate marking!

Jumpin’ Jupiter on a Thorsicle, I really really really marking papers.

AND ITS DAN’S BIRTHDAY! Everyone add a blasphemously happy birthday comment for dear old Dan!

loltheist

loltheist


Should We Blaspheme? Not Always…

Published
by
Hemant Mehta
on September 30, 2009
.

It’s Blasphemy Day today.

Why do we celebrate it?

Blasphemy Day International is a campaign seeking to establish September 30th as a day to promote free speech and stand up in a show of solidarity for the freedom to challenge, criticize, and satirize religion without fear of murder, litigation, and reprisal. Blasphemy Day takes place September 30th to commemorate the publishing of the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons. The purpose of Blasphemy Day is not to promote hate or violence; it is to support free speech, support the right to criticize and satirize religion, and to oppose any resolutions or laws, binding or otherwise, that discourage or inhibit free speech of any kind.

The Center For Inquiry is running a blasphemy contest through next week to mark the occasion. All you have to do is “create a phrase, poem, or statement that would be or would have been considered blasphemous.”

Paul Kurtz is the founder and former Chairman of CFI and he thinks the contest is in the wrong spirit. I have to say I agree with him.

It is one thing to examine the claims of religion in a responsible way by calling attention to Biblical, Koranic or scientific criticisms, it is quite another to violate the key humanistic principle of tolerance. One may disagree with contending religious beliefs, but to denigrate them by rude caricatures borders on hate speech. What would humanists and skeptics say if religious believers insulted them in the same way?

It’s not just the contest that’s the problem. It’s the idea of blasphemy, used in the wrong way.

If you’re doing something blasphemous today, ask yourself these questions:

  • Are you doing it to make some larger point?

  • Are you doing it to begin a conversation?

  • Are you doing it just to piss off religious people?

  • What are you trying to accomplish?

Blasphemy isn’t always bad, of course. When Jyllands-Posten published “blasphemous” cartoons about Muhammad — and a few other newspapers and magazines followed — they were doing it to support freedom of the press. A very important point was made: just because you find something or someone sacred doesn’t mean the rest of us have to follow suit. More power to those institutions which stood up to the violent protestors.

Yes, you could hold a sign that reads, “FUCK JESUS.” You could wear a shirt like this. You could paint a picture of religious deities doing all sorts of disgusting things with barnyard animals. But what would be the point?

Without a good reason, you’re not showing the general public that we ought to take advantage of our right to free speech. You’re only showing them you’re a jerk.

I’m not trying to act holier-than-thou or anything, either.

Several affiliates of the Secular Student Alliance are celebrating their own way and I support what they’re doing.

For example, At LSU, Matthew Shepherd’s campus atheist group has a plan of action:

Shepherd said the group will hand out fliers about the Jyllands-Posten cartoons from 10 a.m. until at least 12:30 p.m., and AHA might set up a system for students to exchange Bibles for materials “promoting free thinking.”

That’s what the day should be about: opening peoples’ minds, not simply offending them for the sake of it.

Just because you can blaspheme doesn’t mean you have to blaspheme.

…

***Update***: Current CFI CEO Ron Lindsay has responded to Kurtz’s piece.

Paul Kurtz does offer to the readers of Free Thinking a choice between two starkly different views of CFI. There is the CFI that stands with those who believe we should be free to criticize religion just as we criticize other beliefs; then there is the neo-Kurtzian vision of a CFI that would tiptoe around criticism of religion for fear of giving offense. There is a CFI that believes that art, even when it might be considered crude or offensive to some, may have symbolic value, and, in any event, deserves protection; and then there is the neo-Kurtzian CFI that advocates censorship of art. There is the CFI that honors those who have risked everything to express their views about religion; and then there is the neo-Kurtzian CFI that equates critique of religion with hate speech.

Kurtz wasn’t arguing against critiquing religion, though. He was against attacks on religion that had no point other than to offend. There’s a difference between criticizing what the Bible says and drawing a picture called “Jesus Does His Nails”:

No one’s trying to censor the artist or anyone else for that matter.

Again, I think Kurtz is asking what I’m asking: If you’re “blaspheming,” are you doing it for the right reasons?

(On a side note, like Ron Lindsay, I would like to know why Kurtz is using the phrase “fundamentalist atheist”…)



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