If you want to help the tornado victims in Oklahoma, I recommend making a donation via Foundation Beyond Belief’s Humanist Crisis page:
http://foundationbeyondbelief.org/crisis
They are funneling the money to local organizations on the ground, specifically the Oklahoma Food Bank and the local branch of Operation USA. They do not keep any portion of these crisis funds for their own costs, it all goes to Oklahoma. You can donate using a credit or debit card, or via PayPal.
As an American I cringe when my beloved country is made to look stupid and parochial, violent and bullying, bigoted and cruel. Some of us are, of course, but that is not what it means to be American. We who remember that this country is a product of the Enlightenment are as or more appalled than any by a visible and vocal minority who act in ways that subvert those ideals and promote suppression, hatred, small-mindedness, and a smug indifference to the suffering of others as American values. They are not, and I and other Americans like me won’t let them be; we insist on being the positive America, the one that is a compliment not an insult.
“Atheist” is not an insult either; it is either a simple factual descriptor (atheist, n.; one who lacks god beliefs) or it is naming of someone as a member of a community. While there have been and are atheist assholes out there, and no doubt there will continue to be such, and they are by the dictionary definition truly atheists and I am not trying to say otherwise, those aren’t members of the community I want to talk about here; I want to talk about the positive and life-affirming community of atheists I’ve become an involved member of over the last year.
These are a couple of the reasons that I am proud to be a member of American Atheists, and why my attendance at this year’s 50th Anniversary National Conference reaffirmed that pride. American Atheists is not simply a collection of people who happen to be American citizens lacking god beliefs; it is that, of course, but that is far from the totality of what it is.
Virtually all atheists agree with the proposition that church and state ought to be separate, if for no other reason than simple self-preservation. It was notable, however, that every speaker at the conference (and for that matter every non-speaker I spoke with during the breaks and evenings) were concerned not just with securing freedom from any possible suppression of atheists per se, but with preserving the existence of a marketplace of ideas, where minority viewpoints of all kinds are given respect… which is to say, the respect of being allowed to compete on even terms, not the false respect of remaining unchallenged. An honest and open debate was considered a universal good by literally every person I met there. This is perhaps the very essence of Enlightenment thinking; seeking truth through reason and inquiry, rather than blind acceptance of authority.
Similarly, every person I met and/or listened to at the conference was foursquare for active engagement in public life, another Enlightenment ideal which people like Thomas Jefferson, or Elizabeth Cady Stanton, or Madalyn Murray O’Hare herself considered vital to a republic of free citizens. No one even remotely advocated turning aside from the task of trying to continually improve the quality of life in our society by engaging in civic governance; voting of course, but also advocacy and activism. American Atheists is nothing of not a fiercely activist advocate of the practical application of secular humanist values!
Instead, the arguments were made clearly and passionately that we must become more involved, more inclusive, more dedicated to the common good. The range of speakers gave eloquent evidence that this was not lip service but a real and substantial commitment; rather than a parade consisting of white men only, there were Hispanic and African-American speakers, and powerful voices from women and the LGBT community, and the speakers who looked like me (at least to the extent of being white guys, no offense fellahs!) were all firmly and unapologetically in favor of continuing and expanding that trend. (It was particularly clear that the obnoxious MRA ‘slymepitter’ contingent were not present and would not be welcome, which I found gratifying.)
Not unrelated to that, and of key importance to understanding the difference between the dictionary definition of American atheists and the community represented (among other such organizations) by American Atheists, human rights took center stage throughout the conference. We are not simply a bunch of people who don’t believe in religions; we are a bunch of people who are enraged by the damage done by religions and the false dogmas they perpetuate: racism, sexism, homophobia and related bigotries primarily among them, but also the denial of knowledge and understanding of the world inflicted upon children, the retardation of scientific progress, the idiocies and inequities perpetuated upon our society by acceptance of norms based on nothing but arbitrary unfounded beliefs.
One specific example of that, by the way, and not an unimportant one, is the overwhelming sex-positivity of this community. That doesn’t mean non-stop orgies (yes, yes, I haz a sad too – jk!), but it’s an amazing thing to see just how pervasive and corrosive are the guilt trips which the major religions of this society have laid upon what should be one of the true joys of life, and by seeing those chains begin to free yourself from them.
I’ll be referring back to this conference and some of the specific speakers I heard and people I met, but I wanted to get this general impression out there before much more time passed lest I find myself procrastinating the event into oblivion. It was an intensely thought-provoking long weekend and I’ll be digesting it for some time, but suffice to say for the moment that it was well worth the cost to attend!
The conference marked my one year anniversary of trying to be a more activist atheist; I still have a lot of growing and expanding to do with respect to that, but I’ve learned and experienced a great deal of overwhelmingly positive things in the process, and no organization is more responsible for that growth than American Atheists.
I’d say “50 more years!” but the truth is we’re all working toward the day our organization will make itself obsolete, unnecessary, and redundant!
The video of the conversation between these two gentlemen has now been made available on the website of the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science:
Note the incredibly insightful question by the gentleman with the thick neck at 1:33:40.
While still asleep, or mostly so,
I blindly reached out to you.
You were (awake) never there,
never had been (awake) there,
so I might perhaps seem a fool
or at least naive, to reach out so.
I pulled a pillow near,
and in my sleepy arm
you nestled warmly, quietly.
My night passed quietly.
I lay content, lay warm
in a love not even here.
Sometimes a dream can warm.
Sometimes a love, reaching,
finds a pair for a sole heart’s
dreaming. Maybe two hearts
can find each other, dreaming,
In the quiet hours before dawn.
Fools and the wise meet in the deep.
Around my dream abysses lurk
treacherous, fearful, scary, dark.
Here and now, this present dark
is warm though, and loving. No hurt
can touch me, here with you, asleep.
–
BT Murtagh
The Good News Club: The Christian Right’s Stealth Assault on America’s Children
I had the good fortune to meet with Ms. Stewart when she addressed the Secular Humanists of the Lowcountry at one of our recent meetings. She is an articulate and charming speaker, and gave a précis of her work which was disturbing and thought-provoking enough in itself. The full impact will only be felt if you follow the story as it unfolded to her, as recorded in “The Good News Club” in detail.
The title of Stewart’s “The Good News Club” refers to a particular after-hours school club infiltrating public primary schools in a very systematic and organized way by Evangelical Christian groups, in an attempt to recruit children into their particular brand of Christianity.
I do not use the word infiltrate lightly; it is a false-flag operation on multiple levels. The Good News Club presents itself as a general, ecumenical and nondenominational Christian Bible study group to the parents of the communities it targets, but they and their parent organization the Child Evangelical Fellowship are actually rigidly authoritarian Biblical literalists.
Stewart documents how they will blandly assure Catholics, for example, about how nonthreatening they are, but subsequently indoctrinate the children with theological positions that tell them Catholics and adherents of other “incorrect” sects of Christianity are doomed to Hell. Needless to say the same applies to all the children’s atheist and non-Christian theist friends. The object is to get the kids to preach to their peers, typically in exactly that bullying fashion of telling them they will burn in Hell if they don’t believe “correctly” (i.e. in Evangelical Christian style).
This inculcation of child preachers is one of the foundational principles of the Good News Club. Teachers are not allowed to preach religion in public schools, of course, or lead public prayers. Students can, though, and the false flag that the GNC works through is to coach the kids into doing that preacher’s work for them. It is legally defensible as permissible “student-led activity” even though (as Stewart pointed out in her presentation) it is in reality no more student-led than a Little League meeting – adults organize the group’s meetings, teach the kids what to do, set their goals, track their progress, and reward their achievements. (From the very beginning the children are conditioned with rewards like sugary snacks, first to attend and then to recruit.)
There is also a deliberate effort on the part of GNC organizers to blur the lines between school activities and GNC activities; one of the first Good News Clubs Stewart came across was actually offered free space of superior suitability in a neighboring church, but they preferred to continue using the school. The aim is obviously to absorb some of the school’s cloak of authority for the Club’s teaching, and it works; Stewart relates how one girl, when told that her schoolmate was not in fact going to Hell for not being the right kind of Christian, objected that she’d been taught it in school, and they couldn’t teach wrong things in school. This was not an isolated incident, but an example of a desired result of GNC policy; they want those kids confused in that way.
Another confusion which works to the advantage of the Good News Club organizers lies at the heart of why they are allowed to preach religion in a school at all; Stewart goes into some detail about the implications of the Supreme Court case that let that particular camel’s nose into the tent. The confusion lies in conflating the right to free speech and the right to freedom of conscience; I won’t go into a great deal of detail here but Stewart does an excellent job of presenting how this conflation actually puts religiously based clubs like GNC in a supercategory with greater protections than any normal club would have.
I for one was totally unaware that taxpayer-maintained public schools are now commonly repurposed on Sundays as out-and-out churches, and I’m not at all happy about that either. Not only does it direct public funds toward sectarian uses (building maintenance isn’t free!) but it further erodes the distinction in children’s minds between the secular public school and the church that inhabits the same building. It’s a double whammy for the church; they get a fantastic deal on a building they could not possibly afford if they weren’t sucking off secular tax monies, and they get the blurring of authorities too.
It’s hard to know where to stop on this, but I suppose that the preceding will give you an idea of what kind of information to expect from this important book. Once again, I strongly urge you to read it.
You can also get more information at the Web site thegoodnewscclub.com where Katherine Stewart posts relevant articles and maintains a blog on the subject. The situation is continuing to worsen while this problem flies under almost everyone’s radar.
This is just a quick follow-up to my last post. I live in the South and pretty much all my cow orkers are country boys (who will describe themselves as “rednecks” with a smile) who love to hunt. I was curious as to what those guys thought about the prospect of increased gun control.
The first thing I learned is that gun stores around here have been sucked virtually dry of guns and ammo. One of my workmates has a brother-in-law with a gun shop, and he told me that a stock of about 150 handguns prior to the Newtown massacre is now down to single digits. 9mm ammo is very very thin on the ground – the only kind his BIL had left was hollowpoints, “mushroomers” as he called them, which he wasn’t interested in because they’re too expensive and he doesn’t actually want to kill anyone.
Now, these are handguns we’re talking about, not hunting weapons. There are still plenty of rifles and shotguns to be had. This is anecdotal of course, but that suggested to me that the “law-abiding hunters have rights too” meme isn’t really much more than a figleaf. It’s mostly antipersonnel weaponry that people around here are afraid of losing.
I asked my gun-loving friends why they thought gun sales were up so sharply; surely, I pointed out, anyone around these parts who felt they needed any particular gun would already own one. I could understand stockpiling ammo, if you were paranoid about imminent new controls, but guns last for generations – even if they stopped selling them tomorrow, the ones you have aren’t going anywhere so why suddenly buy more of them?
I did get one good answer: speculation. The one with the brother-in-law had picked up a second-hand Glock 9mm because he figured he could sell it on as a private individual and at *least* make his money back as long as gun control was on the legislative agenda. He then added with a grin, “If they do pass anything serious I’ll make a killing.”
I asked him what he thought of closing that so-called “gun show” loophole to prevent private sales like that. He shrugged and said it wasn’t anything he made regular money at, and his brother-in-law would be delighted.
I went on to ask their opinions on the laundry list of what I consider sensible gun laws detailed in my last post – gun licenses with required safety training and proficiency testing renewed at regular intervals, legal responsibility for damages caused by weapons you failed to maintain or keep under control, liability insurance required to cover same, a limitation on hardware with military-level firing rates and magazine capacities, and serialized ammunition.
(As a point of consideration, I suggested that the licensing should cost the same as their current hunting and fishing licenses. I took a wild stab and equated the insurance costs to those of a fishing boat.)
Guess what? They had no squawk with any of that. None of them has a burning desire for fully automatic weapons or 100-round magazines, they recognized that it wouldn’t hurt to have insurance for gun accidents especially if the cost were made low by including all gun owners in the insurance pool, all were more than happy to prove their proficiency with their chosen firearms, they already keep their guns either under their personal control or under lock and key as a matter of common sense, and none of them cared a whit whether there were serial numbers on their ammo since they don’t intend to use them illegally.
Finally, after a bit of discussion they all recognized that most of the people who oppose such regulations are fighting for the right to keep and bear arms *irresponsibly* and without due care and attention for the consequences.
That’s anecdotal as all hell, and the sample size is a nonrepresentative handful and thus not exactly statistically significant, but I take some small bit of encouragement from that response anyway!
Guns don’t kill people. Gun owners kill people, with bullets fired from guns. Let’s regulate those.
There are certainly some sensible limitations on the kinds of firearms and accessories that could be imposed to good effect. We don’t allow people to own just any kind of arms, after all; antipersonnel mines and nerve gas shells are not legal for civilians to own, nor should they be. The same principle can be (and in some jurisdictions already are) applied to limiting the capacity of magazines and the types of ammunition that can be legally sold or possessed…
And speaking of ammunition, the technology exists to serialize bullets so that they are traceable back to the manufacturer, and that traceability can be extended to the sunsequent vendors and buyers; this should be implemented for all newly manufactured ammunition. Sure, there’s plenty of non-serialized ammo out there now, but unlike the guns which can last for generations this is a self-correcting problem.Ammo gets used up (and can go bad if stored too long, something people tend to forget).
But never mind all that. Forget regulating guns and ammo, for the moment. Let’s regulate the gun owners.
It makes sense to do it that way. There are responsible gun owners with perfectly valid reasons for owning guns whose rights should be respected. They do have a right to keep and bear arms. The NRA and fellow travelers like to completely ignore the first half of the Second Amendment tying the right to the need for a well regulated militia, and the Supreme Court has pretty much gone along with them over the past few decades, equating individuals to members of an ad hoc militia.
However, the plain original intent of that Second amendment allows for regulation of that militia, and some regulation of the gun owners would solve the vast majority of America’s gun problems. Regulation costs money, and the proposals outlined below will somewhat raise the cost of gun ownership, but even the NRA can’t claim that the Second Amendment requires that guns be cheap enough for everyone to own one, much as they’d like to.
If it means that fewer poor people can afford a gun, that’s just a trade-off we’ll have to face; most of the poor people I know wouldn’t be overly saddened by the idea that there would be fewer guns in their neighborhoods.
There are slightly more guns than there are people in the United States, and they are next to impossible to keep track of. Any private individual who owns a gun can sell it to anyone else, and no central registry exists to say who currently owns a particular gun. I could buy a gun from a registered gun dealer, and while I may have to pass some kind of backround check to do so I can then walk out into the parking lot of the gun store and sell it to any passing maniac. This is what is misleadingly named the gun show loophole; it doesn’t apply only to shows, and a loophole that big isn’t really a hole, it’s a missing wall. My right as a gun owner to sell that gun can and should be regulated.
So fine, for a first step, without infringing the rights of decent responsible non-criminal people to keep and bear arms; let’s just stop letting them do it anonymously. Let people who want to keep guns accept the responsibility for them, and by that I mean down to the specific gun. Let people have all the guns they want, but let them register each of those guns in a national registry, preferably together with ballistics information where applicable. Make only the unregulated possession of an unregistered firearm an offense.
Let them be legally responsible for what happens with those guns; if they hurt someone due to being improperly maintained, or because they were stolen due to not being carefully stored, then the registered owner should be legally liable for damages. Liability insurance could be required. If there are personal consequences to not storing and caring for your weapons, people will be more liable to store and care for them properly.
We can go further in regulating this ad-hoc militia; we can require that at regular intervals they prove their ability to safely handle the dangerous devices they wish to carry. Basic testing of competence to safely carry and competently fire a gun should be a minimum requirement for a gun owner’s license; a written test to demonstrate an understanding of the rights and *responsibilities* of gun ownership could also be required.
Yes, the model is the driver’s license for a car, why not? It’s the regulation of people who want to use a potentially dangerous device. Just like that license, a sensible penalty for failing to maintain your gun safely and securely, or for using it while drunk or otherwise incapacitated, would be to lose your license. You can be a militia all on your lonesome if you wish, but you will damn well have to be a well regulated one.
Will these steps prevent all gun-related tragedies in America? Of course not. They would certainly reduce them drastically in number and scope, however, and that is surely a goal worthy of expending a little of our national energy toward.
Here we go, another whoosh past the arbitrary point in our orbit we call New Year (not even particularly tied to orbits any more). Happy New Year!
2012 wasn’t bad to me at all.
This was the year I decided I’d become more active as an atheist, and I feel I lived up to that. I attended the Reason Rally, the American Atheists National Convention, the Rock Beyond Belief concert, and the Secular Carolinas Conference. In each case I did the best I could to be an active participant too, and I’ve become more active in my local secular community (Secular Humanists Of The Lowcountry) as well. I’m not a naturally sociable person so all this feels like a real accomplishment to me.
I also participated quite strongly in politics this year. I’ve been disappointed in President Obama in several respects , but I still regard him as a good President overall and certainly incomparably superior to the Republican alternative. I was happy to have been partially instrumental in re-electing him, and maintaining and expanding the Democratic lead in the Senate, and keeping the House on a fairly even keel. I’m still desperately frustrated at how little a citizen can affect the process, but I did my part and helped achieve a better result.
What about my blog? I’ve neglected you disgracefully the past couple of months, Faithful Readers, and I apologize to both of you. That period of time corresponds to two things: I changed shifts from 2pm-10pm to 1am-9am, which you’d think would make blogging easier (probably correctly) but it was a change, and also I think I may have started falling in love about then.
Looking forward to 2013, I have two big trips planned for quite early in the year. I’m going to go home to England at the end of January for a week, mostly to celebrate my Mum’s 80th birthday, and to go to Austin Texas at the end of March to attend the 50th anniversary American Atheists National Convention. Both trips ought to be great fun!
I hope everyone who reads this has as good a 2013 as I plan on having!
Yes, and with what can quite reasonably be called a mandate for change too, at 303 electoral votes and likely to win Florida’s 29 as well when they finish counting.
Democrats (and two independents who caucus with them) also not only held the Senate but expanded their majority in it. Among the new Senators is Tammy Baldwin, first openly lesbian Senator in American history.
Speaking of LGBT issues, Maine and Maryland legalized same-sex marriage – the first time that has happened by direct vote of the electorate. Minnesota defeated an amendment to restrict marriage to opposite-sex couples.
Washington and Colorado legalized recreational use of marijuana, while California and Massachusetts legalized it for medical use.
Michigan repealed the odious and radical emergency manager law that allowed the Governor to override all local government within that state.
The only part disappointing to me was that there was almost no movement in the House, which will remain in Republican hands. Even there there is one spark of progress that caught my eye: although counting is still going on, it looks as if Kyrsten Sinema will become the first openly bisexal member of Congress, serving Arizona’s 9th Congressional District.
All in all, a very satisfying election for progressive Americans! W00t!
UPDATE: I wasn’t aware of this before, but Sinema is also openly nontheist. Since Pete Stark lost his re-election bid, she is now the one and only openly nontheist member of the federal government.
All fine and awful ways come to this end,
for the sons and daughters of the day:
the foe approaches, becomes a friend,
time sinks in, and a tincture of decay
spreads silent within, and darkly grows.
That is not how the night’s life goes.
No easy end greets we of the mossy grave,
The night of veils, even the dayborn knows,
can grasp a soul here, where none can save
or succour, none can live, none fully die.
We, left to the dark, the bruised-black sky,
must be silent, absent from each day we gave
to our posterity, nor in pained nights cry
save this one, dark, hungry night. Be brave,
sweet children. Here, enjoy. Now what do you say?
