A return to controversy

“…it really bugs me that atheists expect others to not pray publicly because they are uncomfortable... What about majority rules?” 

I addressed the above question in the response column to my post before last, and I wrote two draft posts about it. This is the first of those posts.

My feeling when I hear people pray publicly is the same outraged disgust that I would feel if I saw people having sex on the sidewalk. Christians can pray every waking moment for all I care, but nowhere did Jesus or the apostles order anyone to pray aloud in public—in fact, Jesus said just the opposite: “But whenever you pray, go into your room, close the door, and pray to your Father who is hidden. And your Father who sees from the hidden place will reward you.” 

When I hear people praying publicly, I don’t interpret their goal as the obtainment of whatever they’re praying for (they wouldn’t need to pray out loud for that), but rather as an attempt to force their religion upon non-Christians in a way that the founder of that religion opposed. It’s to work toward making America into their version of a “Christian nation” by proving that Christians have the clout to do as they please, and that if the rest of us don’t like it, then we can jolly well move to Iraq where the locals know how to deal with people like us (this being a sentiment that atheists often hear).

Such Christians claim that they’re discriminated against if denied the “right” to turn every event into a worship service to their God, whether it’s a city council meeting, a school board meeting, a school assembly, a high school pep rally, a basketball game, a community improvement club, a Congressional committee, or a gardening club. There is no public park or building that they would leave free of the symbols of their religion, and there is no public meeting that they would leave free of prayer, and they have no qualms about breaking the law to accomplish their goals.

When they’re confronted with the illegality of much of what they do, they say they serve God first, and that when the law of the land goes against what God wants (they, of course, know what God wants), God expects them to violate the law. Whereas such Christians used to make much of their patriotism, they now claim that our government has been overrun by the forces of Satan (as exemplified by abortion, secularism, gay rights, and universal healthcare), and say that it is their goal is to win it back to God (unregulated capitalism intertwined with Christian worship and morality) because to do otherwise is to see it fall into complete ruin and be enslaved by its enemies in the same way that ancient Israel was enslaved when it “turned from God.”

All this, and certainly not the prayer itself, is what's primary, so it’s what atheists hear when they attend a public meeting only to find themselves an audience to a Christian religious observance. They are often advised to simply not listen, or to get up and leave until the prayer is over, but the point is not that they’re in the minority and should have the good manners to go along with the majority’s wishes, but that they’re in a meeting that is supposed to be for all the people and should therefore be immune from practices which would exclude any of the people.

The “keep quiet because you’re in the minority” argument suggests that Christians would be willing to listen to prayers to Allah or Rev. Moon if Moslems or Moonies should achieve a majority. Yet, this doesn’t jibe with their claim that America will fall into the pit if they fail to subjugate it under a Christian version of Sharia Law. So, no, I will not keep quiet. I can but hope that I will never have to sue to be free of other people’s religion. But if I do, I can at least take comfort in the fact that it will be in a liberal city in Oregon instead of in what Sarah Palin called “the real America,” by which she meant those rural areas in which people consider “book learning” the enemy of “common sense,” and believe that God wants them to bring misery into the life of anyone who holds different values than themselves.

When I think of such people—among whom I lived for 36 years—I can but wonder why those who are too stupid to use proper grammar and spelling when emailing unreasoning venom to their opponents, should be so arrogant as to imagine that they are God’s chosen people, the best people on earth; that heaven is going to be populated by people just like them; and that heaven’s residents are going to spend eternity watching their enemies writhe in agony in the lake of fire that their God of Love created. Forget China, Iran, North Korea, and Islamic extremists, America’s enemies are within its borders, and they march under the banner of Christ.

The question is, can they succeed? No, at least not to the extent they would like, because they don’t have the broad support. Where they’re in the majority, they’re tyrannous, but they’re not in the overall majority, and the harder they push, the more they’re going to be pushed against. That said, they are extremely powerful, and just as the National Rifle Association wields a power far greater than its numbers, so do militant Christians. Yet, the numbers of Americans who consider themselves non-religious is mushrooming (21% last I heard), especially in people under 30. Unless something happens to turn that around, secularism will win. It might not be in my lifetime, but Christianity will eventually lose its clout, and I believe its awareness of that possibility is why it has become so aggressive since 9/11. 

Photo by Will Kuhns

The FFRF, God's Big Ten, and a form of Christianity that I respect

“All of you must obey the government rulers…anyone who is against the government is against something God has commanded.” Romans 13: 1-2

The FFRF supports nonbelievers in various ways, most notably through lawsuits against those who violate existing laws regarding the separation of church and state. Among its current suits are two against Pennsylvania public schools that prominently display large granite monuments containing the Ten Commandments (henceforth, the Big Ten). Schools always lose these suits because what they are doing is illegal, and this means that they will not only have wasted tens of thousands of school dollars on their own attorneys, they will also have to pay the FFRF’s attorneys.

The Big Ten are a big deal to the many American Christians who claim that the commandments are beyond human wisdom, and as such, form the foundation of our laws today. Yet, with the exception of the first four, which concern the Jews’ relationship with their deity, the Big Ten are painfully obvious to anyone with an IQ above fifty. What’s more, of the first four, Christians themselves blatantly ignore the second half of #2 and all of #4. Why then, are they so obsessed with posting the Big Ten on public property? I think it’s their way of asserting their supremacy (like when a dog pisses on a fire hydrant) with the implication that anyone who objects can jolly well go fuck himself. Ironically, the FFRF gets lots of mail from Christians who don’t appear to know about the third commandment (don’t take the Lord’s name in vain), and these same Christians are inordinately fond of the word fuck, which is why I used it just now in conveying their feelings toward people like myself. I’m now going to write out the Big Ten and add my own brief commentary so that you can judge for yourself how useful they really are.

1) You must not have any other god before me. Here, Jehovah acknowledges the existence of lesser deities, this being just one example of how the Jews’ conception of their deity evolved over time, yet the storyline is that “God is the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow.” 

2) You must not make for yourself an idol of any kind or an image of anything in the heavens or on the earth or in the sea. I’ve heard that Moslems partially observe this, but Christians somehow decided that images are okay. I have no idea why. Maybe they just like to draw.

3) You must not misuse the name of the Lord your God. As in “Goddamn the goddamn mother-fucking goddamn son of a bitch to hell, goddamn it,” which was my father’s favorite chant and one that he repeated many times a day. Because he said it with such fervor, I pretended that he was a holy man offering a prayer, and this enabled me to smile.

4) Remember to observe the Sabbath day by keeping it holy. The early church gave up the Sabbath and started worshipping on Sunday. As with deciding that images were permissible, their reasoning is a mystery, at least to me. Maybe Billy Graham could tell you.

5) Honor your father and mother. This commandment applies to drunken molesters as well as to deserving parents. This is the only one of the remaining six that is given as something to do rather than something to avoid. Unlike Jesus, Jehovah was more concerned with avoiding evil than with doing good, which is why Jesus stayed so mad at the orthodox Jews of his day over their obsession with living in perfect purity at the cost of being sincere and loving. It is another example of how the Biblical God evolved.

6) You must not murder. Prior to this time, the Jews apparently thought that murder was okay. People in other lands were able to figure out that it was a crime without God telling them, so why the Jews needed to be told, I can’t imagine.

7) You must not commit adultery. I could do without this one, but that would bring the number to nine, and nine wouldn’t have the same authoritative ring, almost as if God had run out of ideas or got tired of writing.

8) You must not steal. Like with wanton killing, the early Jews had no clue that stealing was a bad idea. Before the Top Ten, they stole anything that wasn’t nailed down, and the people they stole from didn’t even know enough to complain.

9) You must not testify falsely against your neighbor. Yep, you guessed it. If the Big Ten contains divine wisdom rather than human wisdom, then lying must have been okay before Moses came down the mountain. Afterwards, a lot of people had trouble giving up lying, so judges made them swear that they were telling the truth when court was in session, a practice that continues to this very day.

10) You must not covet your neighbor’s house, wife, male or female servant, ox or donkey, or anything else that belongs to your neighbor. Women came behind houses because items were listed according to monetary value. Peggy owns half of this house, so my share of it is reduced by the same amount, so I think she might be number one on my list. On the other hand, I got Peggy for free, whereas my cat cost $40, so maybe the cat should come first.

American Christians claim to love God’s laws, yet they can’t agree on what they are, and they do an awful lot of seemingly whimsical picking and choosing about which ones to observe. If I were a believer, I would take the approach of Progressive Christians, which is to reduce the number of laws to what Christ said were the main two (love God; love your neighbor), and disregard anything in conflict with them. If such were the dominant face of American Christianity, I wouldn’t spend time criticizing it, but I see its dominant face as hate-driven, materialistic, militaristic, hypocritical, and legalistic. What Christ taught, it is not; and what it teaches, Christ was not.