Category — Atheism

At this time of year, inclusivity is the secret language for holiday celebrations. One favored ritual is the Memory Tree, placed on village greens and town hall lawns lit in lieu of a Christmas tree.

Evidently, the Christmas tree is exclusionary at best, bigoted at worst in this merry time of year and that we cannot have and fulfill the goal of diversity both far and near.

Examine the Memory Tree concept; see how insidiously it works.
Children sing holiday carols such as “Jingle Bells,” “Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer,” and “Frosty the Snowman” while parents snap pictures and make videos for posterity. The Memory Tree lights flare brightly, a siren wails and Mr. and Mrs. Claus enter to wish holiday cheer.

Probably one should go to the tree lighting and observe the religious inclusivity commemorating the event the Memory Tree epitomizes.
There won’t be any Muslims, they celebrate Ramadan and besides, they consider us infidels. Jews have a delightful holiday, Chanukah, the Festival of Lights, so lighting a tree is far down on the to do list.
Animists, I don’t think so, nor Buddhists, Taoists, New Agers, or Zoroasters. One might find the odd druid or Wiccan but the date is wrong. Perhaps a couple Atheists who wandered out just to see how cold they can get but that’s it.

So, who is left, Kwanzaa shoppers or totem carvers hunting for a last minute gewgaw? Of course, must be them!

So, this is diversity; care to explain how this works? Perhaps an elucidation of just who are the bigots is in order.

Lighting a Memory Tree avoids outraging those religions that don’t show up and affronts the religion that celebrates this season. This Memory Tree charade is looking extremely bigoted. The only religion proscribed from celebrating is the one, which celebrates the season.
Let the pagans have the tree.

Christians, light the Nativity Crèche. The season is about Christ, so honor that. Sing “Silent Night,” “O Come all Ye Faithful” and other carols that cause the godless to foul their shorts.
Let the Jews put up the Menorah, I think that is a great symbol that goes with a remarkable story and should be celebrated because it is desired, not from some idiot’s sense of “fairness.”

Definitely, there is a place for the Memory Tree; it should be in the shape of the dollar sign. For celebration, June 25th is available and is quite apropos. Light the tree then.

Non-believing US voters feel demonized

One presidential hopeful is a preacher, another proudly Mormon, and most openly tout their Christianity. In an arena where faith can make or break a politician, the one in 10 Americans who profess no religion feel left in the cold.

“They’re very disconcerted,” said Darren Sherkat, an atheist sociology professor specializing in religion at Southern Illinois University. [snip]

I’m sure this gentleman has a solid religious background from which to expand his knowledge of faith and beliefs.

Ian Thomas, 25, got involved in political campaigning as a student and in 2005 ran for a place on the school board in his local district in Pennsylvania.

Days before the vote, a county council member emailed local community groups disparaging Thomas for having an atheist bumper sticker on his car, and for writing a letter about atheism to a local newspaper.

“They are entitled to their beliefs and free speech but it doesn’t make a sound foundation for elected officials who makes our laws … to promote an Atheist that we know anything about,” read the ungrammatical email, shown to AFP. [snip]

But they are also “the least tolerated group by conventional standards of religious toleration in the US,” Sherkat said. [snip]

One might say the sins of their “religion” are visited upon them; who believes the Missouri Synod or the Archdioceses of NY and DC sued to remove “In God We Trust” from coinage. Or wishes to eradicate the word God from general use. Why do they want “religious toleration” since they reject religion

“Legally, there is no religious test for office, but culturally there obviously is,” he said, as polls showed Republican Mike Huckabee, an ordained Baptist minister, surging ahead in key early nominating states. [snip]

More than one in 10 US adults have no religious affiliation, according to the census figures.

Having no religious affiliation does not default to atheism or agnosticism.

But a Gallup poll in February found more than half of voters would not back an otherwise well-qualified candidate from their favored party if that person was an atheist. [snip]

“The fair question would be to ask … will you impose your theology on civil law?”

And another fair question is, from what body of law was civil law derived? Heh?

“There is no candidate that an atheist would vote for … other than maybe Ron Paul,” Shermer said, naming a Tennessee lawmaker, a long-shot Republican contender.

“He’s a libertarian who feels absoutely (for) separation of church and state.”

“Many of the candidates would be acceptable to me regardless of their religious faith,” Stark told AFP. “Jimmy Carter (who became president in 1977) was perhaps the most personally strident conservative Christian — and I think he did a wonderful job.”

That last statement about sums it up; what further proof of the absence of reason is necessary, except that Ron Paul is from Texas.

Or “hypocracy” which is the preferred spelling for Republican-haters I’ve encountered in the blogosphere.  The word is “hypocrisy”, and its joyous discovery in Larry Craig was the newest golden strand woven  into the vestments of pulpiteering leftists everywhere.  Craig was more proof for their contempt and curtain-twitching scorn for an entire social class: Republicans.  It’s the same confirmation error and simplification underlying all stigmatizing prejudices, but this one is clean because the opinion-makers and liberal elites hold it to be true.

For leftists Craig narrowed the probability that all Republicans are swine.  Think of the yokel who flips a coin 99 times, and having found heads 99 times, thinks the probability of having tails has changed from 50 -50, to 100 to 1,  and bets his house on the outcome.  With millions of adherents, one Republican or Democrat scoundrel, or a thousand, proves nothing about either party, but that’s an idea too complex and knotty for some to unwind.  Even one as bright as the one who parried with us recently about Chris Dodd.   We’ll call him Genius.   He told us he had an IQ of 135  possessed a Master degree and had graduated magna cum laude.

Genius was infuriated by a rude post about Chris Dodd.  Genius detested Republicans, and disgorged a list of Republican types linked to Tom Delay and Jack Abramoff; a few convicted but most indicted, linked, charged, suspected, probed or investigated for wrongdoing, and therefore to the hanging-judge mentality of a pious lefty, guilty.  Then Genius moved on to Larry Craig.

Pertinent to the suspicions about Craig, Genius referred to the Republican Party as The Gay Old Party, and continued to some very suspect comments of his own about homosexuality.  He then ignored being exposed for indelicate comments about gayness.  But later in the thread, a Dodd volunteer and friend of Genius posted that Genius wasn’t homophobic; but that Republican “bible-thumpers” are the chief foil to gay respectability and their right to marriage.  Well, Craig opposes gay marriage, but so does Chris Dodd, along with 67% of Americans (Gallup 2005), but never mind.  She said:

My take on his “Gay Old Party” remark is that so many Republicans deny gay people the right to marriage, bash their lifestyle as immoral and a sin, yet behind closed doors they’re trolling men’s rooms and hitting on Congressional pages.  Are Dems doing this too?  Safe to say - yes but we’re not the one’s (sic) standing up and thumping our bibles about our superior morals and family values.  It’s the hypocracy (sic) - not the homosexuality that is maddening.

What does this paragraph mean?  Its logic is sub-rational, its ethics risible,  it simply isn’t true in any of its disconnected, anecdotal parts, especially about “so many Republicans” OR so many Democrats.  It’s just a literary delivery system for an idea that requires ventilation over and over, no matter how non the sequiturs and fictitious the evidence.  Republicans are homophobic, hypocritical trash.   Our gaze had to be drawn from the planks in their eyes to the motes in our own.  It always does.  It’s called lefty logic.

All ideas have a lineage, a provenance.  Leftism devolved from liberalism, which itself devolved from the great but conflicted Progressivism of the last century, and the decline continues.   Along the way, leftism picked up attitudes, theories and assumptions from its predecessors which today make up the foul slurry that passes for leftist political thinking.   Some of them are as follows: 

First,  elites in all ages have regarded their social inferiors as reservoirs of bad taste, ignorance, carnality and bizarre religiosity.  (This exists alongside their romanticization of the Rousseauean  brute who services the pool.)  To the arbiters of everything important, hypocrisy in the lower classes is a natural outcome of the contradictions in their behavior, and even sometimes reponsible for their diminished  status.  The people whom I believe to be inferior to me will always confirm my opinion.  The left will always think of Republicans in this way. 

Second, among the intellectual staples of atheism, which clings even today to many believers, is that religion is the cause of more carnage, injustice and suffering than the purest godlessness.   The bad behavior of the religious nullifies the validity of  Belief, and confirms a broad potential hypocrisy in all believers.  Absolute moral spotlessness, and total silence about it is, the only remedy for the crime of believing in God.

Third, if postmodernism is “about” anything, it’s about personal sovereignty, and the assumption that morals are a social construct.  Objective morality can’t be disclosed by Reason, so the individual is the fairest judge of his conduct, as long as he keeps it to himself.  Along with this, moral variation is the validation of personal choice, and solipsism is authenticity.

We could add a fourth, although it isn’t about what leftists think. It’s about what they overlook.  Their implicit claim that violations of moral codes discredit not only the offender, but the code itself and all those who hold to it, is particularly wicked.  Codes exist as maps to conduct; we have them because the road is unknown and hard to follow; not natural to us, and the map springs from a host of human needs and self-expectations.   Without them, we are nothing.

From Ba’hais to Stoics, to Epicureans to low cults, to Christianity, to Islam and all the ascetic Green guides to good living, there’s a code that is imperfectly followed.  Lapses are normal, expected.  Leftist pseudo-morality reminds us of Adam Smith’s pithy comment…”Virtue is more to be feared than vice, because its excesses are not subject to the regulation of conscience”.

“An aggressive German of lordly air, an ascetic who carries the cross like a sword.”

“An earthly Bavarian of friendly visage who lives unpretentiously in a modest dwelling in the vicinity of the Vatican.”

Or maybe “[a]n iron-clad cardinal {Panzer-Kardinal} who has never laid aside the splendid robes and the golden pectoral cross of a prince of the Roman Church.”

These quotes are all authentic, and begin the first chapter of THE RATZINGER REPORT, an interview conducted with the Cardinal back in the early ’80s, which when it came out, was something of a cause-celebre in theological circles. It wasn’t easy to get your hands on the book, and I remember it took some time for me to get it at Villanova. The Cardinal was very much a prestige appointment by the late John Paul, when he named him Prefect for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the successor in interest to the “Roman and Universal Inquisition.” Otherwise known as the “Holy Office.” Ratzinger occupies pride of place in the official list of the Roman Curia, so important is his office, for he preserves the deposit of the Faith from error.

In his own words: “An indispensable point of departure for an understanding {of his work} is and remains a religious perspective, outside of which what is service would appear as intolerance, and what is concern would appear as dogmatism. Thus when one adopts a religious perspective, one understands that faith is the highest and most precious good - simply because truth is … fundamental … for man.”

Again, but this time compare the Church to our own country. “In a world in which, at bottom, many believers are gripped by scepticism, the conviction of the Church that there is ONE TRUTH, and that this one truth can as such be recognized, expressed and also clearly defined within certain bounds, appears scandalous. It is also experienced as offensive by many Catholics who have lost sight of the essence of the Church. The Church is, however, not only a human organization; she also has a deposit to defend that does not belong to her, the proclamation and transmission of which is guaranteed through a teaching office, that brings it close to men of all times in a fitting manner.” You see the Church is creedal, even as our own country is creedal. We do not proclaim one truth, yet nonetheless we hold certain truths to be “self-evident.” And the defense and articulation of those truths by the Church, also serves to buttress the very pillars of our own dear country. Amazing isn’t it. A Church once viewed with deep suspicion by so many early Americans, now is a de facto ally in the defense of the truths that our country has been built upon, and ONLY upon which can be long maintained.

On the courage our times call for: “It is not the Christian who opposes the world, but rather the world which opposes itself to them when the truth about God, about Christ and about man is proclaimed. The world waxes indignant when sin and grace are called by their names….It is time that the Christian reacquire the consciousness of belonging to a minority and of being in opposition to what is obvious, plausible and natural for that mentality which the New Testament calls, and certainly not in a postive sense, the ’spirit of the world.’ It is time to find again the courage of nonconformism, the capacity to oppose many of the trends of the surrounding culture….”

On polling as a way to govern the Church, “the Church of Christ is not a party, not an association, not a club. Her deep and permanent structure is not DEMOCRATIC but SACRAMENTAL, consequently HIERARCHICAL…. Here authority is not based on number of votes; it is based on the authority of Christ himself, which he willed to pass on to men who were to be his representatives until his definitive return.” You are going to wait a long time for somebody to mention that to Chris Matthews, or other members of the MSM who constantly urge the Church to accomodate contemporary culture.

On truth: “It is obvious that truth cannot be created through ballots. A statement is either true or false. Truth can only be found, not created.”

On evil: “The more one understands the holiness of God, the more one understand the opposite of what is holy, namely, the deceptive masks of the devil. Christ himself is the greatest example of this, before him, the Holy One, Satan could not keep hidden and was constantly compelled to show himself…. The devil can constantly take refuge in his favourite element, anonymity, if he is not exposed by the radiance of the person united to Christ.” The chapter that discussed evil and the devil was one of the sources of controversy swirling around this book. The Cardinal called for Catholics to have the disposition of exorcists, not in the technical sense of the term, but rather an attitude that exposes, confronts and expels the forces of evil in our midst.

On the liberation theologians: “What is unacceptable here, and socially dangerous, is this mixture of Bible, christology, politics, soiology and economics. Holy Scripture and theology cannot be misused to absolutize and sacralize a theory concerning the socio-political order. Of its very nature, that order is always contingent. By sacralizing the revolution - mixing up God, Christ and ideologies - they only succeed in producing a dreamy fanaticism that can lead to even worse injustices and oppression, ruining in the praxis what the theory had promised.” In that paragraph you can see why the elite loathe the Cardinal. He dismisses the intellectual pretensions of the Left with the back of his hand.

Lets close our brief look at the Cardinal, by quoting him regarding marxism. Asked which of the many atheisms of our time is the most dangerous: “In in its philosophy and moral goals, marxism represents a more insidious temptation than many practical atheisms which are consequently less ambitious intellectually. For the marxist ideology actually uses the Jewish-Christian tradition and turns it into a godless prophetic movement; man’s religious energies are used as a tool for political ends and directed to a merely earthly hope, which is equivalent to standing on its head the Christian yearning for eternal life. This perversion of the biblical tradition deludes many believers who are convinced in good faith that the cause of Christ is the same as that proclaimed by the heralds of the political revolution.”

So what do you think? Is such a man fit to the be the successor to John Paul? I think so.