Atheist Dominion?
That's right kiddies, the atheists have taken over America and are trying to bury your God and eradicate your right to worship it!
Well, unless you want to acknowledge reality.
In the latest Associated Press/Ipsos poll on religious attitudes within 10 industrialized nations, Americans came out as the most willfully delusioned people in the group. According to this Yahoo News - AP story, this alte-cocker has been around long enough to know just how bleak things really are in this country.
My dearest non-atheist friends say they just wonder why I feel the need to attack people's religious or spiritual beliefs. Why can't I just live and let live? I don't have all the answers so why do I feel the need to bash their attempts to find them?
Well, I suppose if you define bash as pointing out the short-comings of an idea and suggesting a less far-fetched or more statistically likely possibility, then sure I bash my friends. {shakin'head} What do I need with friends any way? To be fair (I know. That's impossible for a Godless freethinker like me!) I can and do get emotional about these things and this kind of story is THE MAIN REASON. The United States is, as conceived and institutionalized, a Secular nation. Our government may absolutely not, under any circumstances, make (any) law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. That isn't some recently added, atheistic attempt to remove infantilism, er, religious influence from the governing process. It is the very First Amendment to a 200+ year old document delineating rights, freedoms and obligations and duties for the proper governmental administration of a religious and secular society. Religion is as protected by this code as much as is reason.
The willful and dangerously rampant ignorance of such as Mr. Black in the AP story are at the heart of the reason this amendment was the very first clarification of delineated rights to be instituted.
Well, unless you want to acknowledge reality.
In the latest Associated Press/Ipsos poll on religious attitudes within 10 industrialized nations, Americans came out as the most willfully delusioned people in the group. According to this Yahoo News - AP story, this alte-cocker has been around long enough to know just how bleak things really are in this country.
"Our nation was founded on Judeo-Christian policies and religious leaders have an obligation to speak out on public policy, otherwise they're wimps," said David Black, a retiree from Osborne, Pa., who agreed to be interviewed after he was polled.Well, I'll give him the bleak part... Do you know how often I've heard this ridiculously ignorant sentiment professed in the media lately? And its almost always used in conjunction with the paranoid delusion that atheists (and other "intolerant" secularizers) are trying to destroy people's right to believe and worship as they see fit. Forget that it has less connection to reality than the idea that George Washington's teeth were made out of wood or Slick Willy's claim that he "did not have "sex" with that woman!" Americans believe it so it must be true!
My dearest non-atheist friends say they just wonder why I feel the need to attack people's religious or spiritual beliefs. Why can't I just live and let live? I don't have all the answers so why do I feel the need to bash their attempts to find them?
Well, I suppose if you define bash as pointing out the short-comings of an idea and suggesting a less far-fetched or more statistically likely possibility, then sure I bash my friends. {shakin'head} What do I need with friends any way? To be fair (I know. That's impossible for a Godless freethinker like me!) I can and do get emotional about these things and this kind of story is THE MAIN REASON. The United States is, as conceived and institutionalized, a Secular nation. Our government may absolutely not, under any circumstances, make (any) law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. That isn't some recently added, atheistic attempt to remove infantilism, er, religious influence from the governing process. It is the very First Amendment to a 200+ year old document delineating rights, freedoms and obligations and duties for the proper governmental administration of a religious and secular society. Religion is as protected by this code as much as is reason.
The willful and dangerously rampant ignorance of such as Mr. Black in the AP story are at the heart of the reason this amendment was the very first clarification of delineated rights to be instituted.
Bravo! Sarcasm aside, my feelings exactly. Wait, include the sarcasm in my feelings as well...
ReplyDelete- Matt
Something that seems unfortunate to me, as someone who thinks of himself as "religious" or "spiritual," is how religion in the media is mainly represented by politicized religion, or at least religion at its most virulently dogmatic.
ReplyDeleteAnd I haven't looked into it a lot, but that recent comment from someone someone to my blog about the founding fathers as deists, was, I thought, interesting. Whenever I've read quotes by them with regard to God or faith, they always struck me as professions of personal faith that personally energized them, and not at all like the religious right's tone of insistence on others going along for their ride.
From what I saw online, it looks like Deists specifically do not believe in revealed religion, and I suspect would reject most of the aspects of religion that the far right finds most compelling as superstition.
It would be neat if somebody really looked into this and did a poster or something, contrasting statements about religion made by the founding fathers vs. some made by the far right.
I can see Ross Perot right now, up on the stage with those graphs of Right-wing interpretations of Deists exclamations amongst the FFs.
ReplyDeleteGood idea and I think I have seen something, not as precise, but with the same concept of showing where the extreme religious leadership simply and blatantly mis-uses quotes and texts from the founding period of this country. I'll seek-a-link.
I'd be very interested to see stats showing how generally well informed (scientifically/ politically) each belief group is in each country. I bet that would show that the US (despite being largely religious) isn't quite as polarised as Fox News et al. would have us believe.
ReplyDeleteAaaaanyway - there's some more stats from older polls on my Facts For Fundamentalists page.
Cheers :-)
We know America is a secular nation. The point is that America has a guidebook, the Constitution. New Atheists repeatedly demonstrate, through debates with sockpuppet trolls, that they have no guidebook like the Bible. The Bible is, of course, a poor guide. The Constitution, however, is a very good guide, and nothing at all like the Bible. But the Constitution is for the entire country. So what secular book would guide individual people? The New Atheists don't have one, and have no intention to write one. But they don't need a guide, because their intention is to sow chaos.
ReplyDeleteThere is an Atheist Dominion, and also a Christian Dominion. They work together, through an unwritten agreement, to try to destroy rational thought. They have convinced most Americans that global warming is a hoax. The Atheist part claims to be perpetrating it, and the Christian part claims to be debunking it. Meanwhile, the real global warming continues to get worse and worse.
Who exactly are these "New Atheists"?
ReplyDeleteYou're spot about the guide book being the Constitution, though. I'd suggest reading up on recent advances in neural biology as well. Just too see how I brains inhibit rational thought, ironically as a survival trait!