I’m going to tell you what to do!

Stop that!

Dennis Terry, pastor of Greenwell Springs Baptist Church in Louisiana, when introducing Rick Santorum, went on a tirade about what people are saying ‘he’ can’t do as a Christian and as an American.

Here are the two things he mentioned specifically and it made me wonder, what are some other things Christians are being told they can’t do? (* – are his comments)

“Don’t voice your beliefs!”*

The first of those two led me to the story of El Paso Mayor John Cook where he’s suing a local Pastor (Tom Brown) for using his church and the church network as a place to pass out politically-bent fliers against a ballot initiative that would deny or limit benefits to city same-sex couples.   The initiative succeeded but was overturned later by one vote, Mayor John Cooks’.   This predictably led to an outcry by the pastor to claim that the will of the people had been thwarted and the attack is meant to silence freedom-loving citizens.   Thing is, it is legal for the El Paso government body to overturn a ballot initiative if they can get the required votes from both the mayor’s office and the city council.   They did, it was overturned and now law-suits are flying.

The lesson here?   Don’t voice your beliefs with the expectation that they will be enjoined and enshrined into whatever forum you would impose them.   I think it’s true that Theists and religiously-affiliated citizens feel threatened when they don’t win the day.   To some degree, we all feel that way when our views aren’t shared and adopted.   But to confuse and obfuscate the reasons behind our political and social defeats as some kind of usurpation of law and a violation of human rights, ‘We would have won if Satan wasn’t running this show!’, is dishonest and dangerous.   It ignores the fact that the law has been followed, whether you agree with the law or not.

And don’t get me started on activist churches using their tax-exempt status on the one hand while publicly supporting a candidate, (organizing, fund-raising and all the rest) on the other hand.   Those are political and ideological institutions masquerading as moral beacons; less moral than political but one does ‘wag’ the other.   Can you guess which one does the wagging?

“Don’t use churches as political organizations!”

We should really slap a hefty fine on churches that openly campaign from the pulpit, by fliers and leaflets for political candidates!   No more tax-exempt status, FOR YOU!   But can you imagine the ‘bat-shit crazy’ that would stir up?   So, we’ll have to bear with being blackmailed a while longer with the inevitable violence and martyrdom that would vociferously proliferate in the fact-free minds of blinded religious zealotry.   This somehow reminds me of Islamic extremism; the reaction to the film “Submission” by Theo Van Gogh and Ayaan Hrsi Ali, or the Mohammed Cartoon reaction, oh, or how about the recent reaction to the Koran burnings.   Yes, I do know that this is the ‘alarmist-me’ talking but I don’t think I’m far off the mark in saying that stripping (offending) churches of tax-free status would send right-wing religious fundamentalism in a startling frenzy of extreme acts of violence.

Still, it’s wrong and it should be stopped.   There, I said it!

“Don’t pray in public!”*

Wait, you mean like ‘..the hypocrites’ (Matt 6: 5,6).   This is almost comical.

Now I’m familiar with the Bible and I know a little about how belief-systems work.   I’m sure there are raging arguments about what this verse or passage really means.   There are many mentions of public prayer in the Acts of the Apostles and Jesus himself prayed to God right before giving up the ghost.   The working argument probably runs along the lines that it is the hearts’ intent that determines whether someones prayer is hypocritical and self-serving and not the loci in relation to other human beings.   So, one could pray in public, but if their heart is right with God, then somehow that’s ok.   Thing is, and I’m going to take a liberty here, we all know that public prayer, whether you have actively participated or just listened to it, is ALWAYS directed, at some point in the prayer or in some way, at the people present.   And what a duplicitous thing it is too; “We thank you Lord for bringing this deacon to our fold, a true and godly man with a gentle loving spirit”.   See that?   It pretends to be a prayer to God, but it’s also a declaration, a binding, a knob-jobbing, and an ass-kissing to this deacon fella.   Not ONLY that, it serves to make the person praying seem even more holy than they are, more convicted than the next guy.. ya know, more like a Christian.

“Praying out-loud: The best way to glorify yourself is to glorify others and glorify God!”

And here Dennis Terry is, crying out against the just criticism that praying in public places (and by public, we mean government institutions like schools) is wrong and even illegal.   Well, Mr. Terry, it is wrong and it is illegal and if you don’t want to take my word for it, maybe you should listen to the Christ you claim to worship.   Or were you just using that guy as another way to make yourself look pious?

“Don’t tell me to protect the Earth!”

Representative John Shimkus recently laid out the reasons we don’t need to moderate, regulate or protect our resources for environmental reasons; “‘The earth will end only when God declares its time to be over. Man will not destroy this earth.”.  Sit back, relax, consume gas and oil by-products, frack away, dump baby dump.. none of it matters because apparently we couldn’t destroy the earth if we wanted to.   Nevermind that this is categorically false.   Please allow me to bring as one of my primary witnesses, the planet Venus.   Nevermind that even the Bible says mankind is charged with the care of the earth.

“Don’t tell me I can’t teach Creationism in Schools!”

‘Teach the controversy’ is a familiar retort to anyone paying attention to this so called ‘debate’.   Problem is, like everything faith-based and specifically because it IS faith-based, it is NOT science.   There is no evidence, falsifiable or otherwise.   Where Science leaves open questions open, a creationist will merrily declare that God did it with no offering of any kind of empirical data.   Magic.   The other side, <cough> Science, creates debate and operates in constant doubt.   Science seeks to prove hypotheses and questions remain open until they are answered, the results repeated independently and found to be accurate or true.   Even then, they are open to modification and further study and learning that becomes available as Science moves forward.   And that study and learning has taken us far.   The evidence for evolution is enormous; so much so that it has graduated to the ranks of a Theory in the same sense of the word as ‘Gravitational Theory’, ‘Particle Theory’ and ‘Nuclear Theory’ among other well tested, documented and verified theories.

Indeed, to teach creationism as science flies in the face of a personal faith-based belief in a god in the first place.   Faith and proof are mutually exclusive; if you could empirically prove God’s existence, what need of faith?   And more disturbing to me, if you have faith in God’s existence, what need of evidence?

 

~~~

Can you think of any other claims of censorship Theists are struggling under?

What are your thoughts regarding the claims I have listed above?   Do you agree or disagree, and why (or why not)?

A little game I play.

As I get older, and working in a University environment with wave after wave of young people, I like to see where they fall in the “Do you know..?” categories.   This is usually to do with bands and musicians I grew up with but often overlaps into political figures and icons as well.   Now, this does actually go both ways; I know next to nothing of Pikachu, Dragon Ballz or a host of other things this next (and next) generation has grown up with.   It is much like the Rumsfeld observation about things we ‘..don’t know, we don’t know’.   Thus my list of unknowns is so short.

Speaking of which, do they know who Rumsfeld is?

Anyway, today I asked a young whipper-snapper if he knew who Santorum was.   As many of you who have read my other blogs know, Santorum is an endless well of fascination for me, and not in a good way.   I was all primed to talk about his speech at Oral Roberts University and began with, “Do you know Santorum?”.    To my utter shock, the answer was, ‘No’.   Wow, this still has me reeling.   Sensing that whatever conversation was to follow was not one of interest, I dropped it and we continued working, in silence, for a time.

Thinking back to my own late teens/early twenties did I, asking myself, have any depth of knowledge regarding the party candidates?    While I certainly remember being engaged in the presidential debates and contests themselves, I must admit to having very little knowledge of the primaries.   Maybe it’s unfair after all, to be flabbergasted by this lack of current-events knowledge, but mon Dieue!  He didn’t know who RICK FREAKIN’ SANTORUM was?    /gasp

The Death of Reason

rea·son [ree-zuhn] noun

1. a basis or cause, as for some belief, action, fact, event,etc.: the reason for declaring war.

2. a statement presented in justification or explanation of abelief or action.

3. the mental powers concerned with forming conclusions,judgments, or inferences.

4. sound judgment; good sense.

5. normal or sound powers of mind; sanity.

Rick Santorum recently claimed to a friendly crowd at Oral Roberts University that ‘..the Left is really about the death of Reason’.   This is yet another claim among a growing list from Santorum that has shocked me for its lack of, well, reasoning.

As we can see in the above definition, Reason is defined as a basis or cause for some belief, action, fact, event, etc.: the reason for declaring war.   That’s the first definition anyway and pretty good, all in all; so let’s use that one.

Specifically he was talking about Prop 8 whose ‘.. only practical effect was to “single out a certain class of citizens for disfavored legal status.”.   So, what exactly IS the reasoning here?   Is he claiming that by giving same-sex couples the same legal treatment of life-partnership (marriage), as heterosexual couples already enjoy, where the result would expand the previous definition of marriage as being defined as that of [only] a male and female to include same-sex couples as well, that heterosexual couples are being ‘disfavored’ legally?   Well, yes actually, that appears to be exactly what he is reasoning.

Is that reasonable?   Are hetero-couples really being disfavored?   Have they lost anything?   Besides the right to define things the way they want, no.. they haven’t lost anything.   Prop 8 does not cheapen marriage in any way, but enriches it.

It cannot be claimed as reasonable to believe something for which you have no evidence.   It is necessarily unreasonable to then build a moralistic world-view founded upon such a baseless claim of a divine moral law-giver.   I don’t really care what your imaginary god-person says when no credible reason exists to believe.. it exists.   I’m not going to take your word for it.   You won’t cow me into belief by threats, shouting and gesticulating.   You will not play on my universal human weakness for wishful thinking to hood-wink me.   It is petty, thuggish and wholly unreasonable!