Well, I'm taking a break from discussing the doings of the official de facto GOP Senate candidate Joe Lieberman, to bring you a long awaited overdue Christofascist Idiot Watch Update.
Some good news from Oklahoma, we thankfully have a lawsuit on behalf of a teenager who was kicked off of her high school's basketball team for refusing to pray.
"The plaintiffs, Chester and Nadia Smalkowski of Hardesty, and American Atheists, Inc., a Texas Non-Profit Corporation, are suing 16 defendants for damages due to a number of Civil Rights violations incurred after the Smalkowskis' daughter was allegedly kicked off Hardesty's basketball team, suspended from school and later threatened for refusing to say the Lord's Prayer before a game...So there. I don't have much to say to this, other than that when these kind of things happen, we need to fight back and hit them hard in the courts, which considering our minority status as non-believers, is really our most effective venue for doing this. Kick 'em in their sanctimonious nuts. Hard.
"We are maintaining that there was a conspiracy between a number of governmental employees from the school district to the town of Hardesty to the Sheriff's Department to the District Attorney's Office and the violation is based upon the first amendment right that they have not to pray in school and we believe that the daughter was kicked off the basketball team because she refused to pray in school. "
A few other religion-related readings for your perusal:
Newscientist.com takes on "Why Doesn't America Believe in Evolution?" Big surprise...
"The main opposition to evolution comes from fundamentalist Christians, who are much more abundant in the US than in Europe. While Catholics, European Protestants and so-called mainstream US Protestants consider the biblical account of creation as a metaphor, fundamentalists take the Bible literally, leading them to believe that the Earth and humans were created only 6000 years ago."Two great articles from last month's Free Inquiry magazine - the first is from Tom Flynn, called "What's Wrong With Megachurches?" Megachurches, something that thankfully are absent from the Northeastern U.S. (as far as I know), are humongous Protestant churches that draw a stunning 2 to 30 thousand worshippers at their services every week. I'm not talking total around the country, I mean at the individual churches. What gets really scary, as Flynn points out, is that these shopping mall-sized churches go far above and beyond Sunday services, Many times in suburbs lacking any kind of culture or genuine community, these churches fill many other needs, such as auto repair, basketball teams, prayer circles, voter registration, men's and women's groups, and numerous other things, creating a monoculture where just about everything in the community is done through the megachurch. Scary indeed.
An argument that us non-believers often hear from the faithful is how religion is vital to being a moral person. One of my favorite, more outspoken atheists, Sam Harris, deconstructs that argument in "The Myth of Secular Moral Chaos." Classic Harris:
"One cannot criticize religious dogmatism for long without encountering the following claim, advanced as though it were a self-evident fact of nature: there is no secular basis for morality. Raping and killing children can only really be wrong, the thinking goes, if there is a God who says it is. Otherwise, right and wrong would be mere matters of social construction, and any society would be at liberty to decide that raping and killing children is actually a wholesome form of family fun. In the absence of God, John Wayne Gacy could be a better person than Albert Schweitzer, if only more people agreed with him."
No comments:
Post a Comment