School Board Takes Down Ten Commandments Display

Last time we heard from Giles County, Virginia, a Ten Commandments display was going up in Macy McClaugherty Elementary/Middle School and others in the district.

The Freedom From Religion Foundation told Superintendent Terry E. Arbogast this was illegal and he informed them he would take it down immediately. (Shocking, I know!)

But soon after that, the school board unanimously voted to reverse his decisions.

That was a month ago and there is now some happy news to report.

The pressure worked! First, a couple families decided to sign on to a lawsuit:

Two Giles County families with children in public school will force the issue into court as plaintiffs, according to Wisconsin-based Freedom From Religion Foundation. The foundation will work jointly with the American Civil Liberties Union of Virginia to represent the families.
“Plaintiffs with children in the schools have come forward,” Annie Laurie Gaylor, Freedom From Religion’s co-president, said on the organization’s Feb. 12 radio program.
“They’re our heroes.”

And that was all it took! Yesterday, the school board voted to take down the Commandments.

In a specially called meeting this morning that required no advance notice, the Giles County School Board voted to remove the Ten Commandments from the walls of the county’s five schools and technology center.
…
Officials in Giles County Public Schools, acting on a school board vote, removed controversial displays of the Ten Commandments this morning from various buildings, said Amanda Tickle, board clerk and executive secretary in the school system.
The board voted during a 7:30 a.m. special meeting, Tickle said.

It’s as if they knew they would lose the lawsuit because what they were doing was illegal…

FFRF is threatening to still continue with the lawsuit (just to keep the school board members on their toes), but my hunch is if the Commandments stay down (for real), they won’t go through with it:

Annie Laurie Gaylor, co-president of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, said today the organization was evaluating today’s development.
“We’re still readying our lawsuit,” she said. “We were planning to file this week, but this may delay it a little bit, I don’t know.”

In any case, the Commandments that shouldn’t have been up at all are no longer there. That’s what happens when atheists step up and are ready to fight.

It’s a reminder that in just about all of these First Amendment lawsuits, we’re on the right side of the issues, and the religious side is wrong. If only atheist parents and teachers and leaders always had the courage to put their name onto a lawsuit, a lot of these problems would never happen in the first place. I know that’s easier said than done, but I have a lot of respect for anyone willing to stand up for the law in cases like this.

SOURCE

This Kid Has The Right Idea

Rape Is God's Will

The Republican Party has long been regarded as anti-woman. After all, it was far-right hero Rush Limbaugh who coined the term "feminazi" to describe those women who dared violate his archaic view of gender roles. I suppose it was inevitable that the party would become anti-woman as soon as they adopted Christian extremism and began to work to strip women of basic reproductive rights. And yet, the vile anti-woman agenda of the Republican Party and their Christian extremist colleagues still catches me off guard at times.

I suspect you've already heard about the lawsuit a retired Sergeant brought against the Pentagon after she was sexually assaulted while serving in Afghanistan. According to Sergeant Havrilla's lawsuit, she sought help from a military chaplain after she encountered a fellow soldier who had raped her a few years earlier. According to the lawsuit,

When SGT Havrilla met with the military chaplain, he told her that 'it must have been God's will for her to be raped' and recommended that she attend church more frequently.

Wow! I've read this quote over and over, and it still makes me feel ill. By itself, it could be dismissed as an isolated bit of craziness; however, when we consider it in the broader context of what is starting to look like a Republican war on women, it becomes much harder to ignore.

Lies Repeated Enough Become True

In an article on the Freedom From Religion Foundation’s work to stop prayer being broadcast over loudspeakers at a Tennessee high school’s football games, a parent responds in defense of the practice:

But parent Jim Rogers, whose son Jason is manager of the football team at East Hamilton School, said he believes public Christian prayer falls under his free speech rights.

“Our country was founded on the principle of religious suffrage and the freedom to express that religion. They incorporated God into our money, the oath of office, our legal system, the Pledge of Allegiance. You cannot find one aspect of our secular government that doesn’t make reference to our creator,” he said.

“Founded on.” In deference to Inigo Montoya, “I don’t think that word means what you think it means.”

The founders did not incorporate god in our money. The first appearance of “In God We Trust” is 1861. It got there by the act of Salmon P. Chase, Secretary of the Treasury, founder of nothing.

The national motto was changed from E Pluribus Unum (From many, One) to “In God We Trust” in the mid 1950’s as a part of the “Red Scare” response to “godless Communism” that also injected “Under God” into the Pledge of Allegiance.

So Help Me God is not an official part of the Presidential Oath of Office.

It is one thing to argue from facts, and another to argue from ignorant beliefs that have been foisted on you by people with an agenda.  All you have to do is repeat a lie often enough and it becomes truth, and the incremental precedents set in all of these small cases, build up to a group of brainwashed Christians actively seeking to designate America a Christian Nation.

Alternatively, you could do a little fact checking and find truth of another person's assertions, rather than simply repeating falsehoods that support the position you wish were true.

Here's what this really is: Another attempt by the fundamental Christians to shove their beliefs in everybody's face, and then when they are asked to stop, claim they are being suppressed. Classic.

When the supreme court rules that “ceremonial deism” or “God inserted to the pledge” is done primarily for secular reasons and has little or no effect on the establishment of religion, I would argue:  Incremental rulings and insertions of God into the secular public square prop up the lunacy and fallacious arguments of people like parent Jim Rogers.

Bishops In Britain Law-Making

Here's a Trivial Pursuit question with an answer that isn't at all trivial. Which two nations still reserve places in their parliaments for unelected religious clerics, who then get an automatic say in writing the laws the country's citizens must obey? The answer is Iran... and Britain.

In 2011, the laws that bind all Brits are voted on by 26 Protestant bishops in the House of Lords who say they are there to represent the Will of God. They certainly aren't there to represent the will of the people: 74 per cent of Britain told a recent ICM poll the bishops should have to stand for election like everybody else if they want to be in parliament. These men use their power to relentlessly fight against equality for women and gay people, and to deny you the right to choose a peaceful and dignified death when the time comes.

And here's the strangest kicker in this strange story: it looks like the plans being drawn up by Nick Clegg to "modernize" the House of Lords will not listen to the overwhelming majority of the British and end these religious privileges. No – they are poised to do the opposite. Sources close to the reform team say they are going to add even more unelected religious figures to parliament. These plans are being drawn up as you read this and will be published soon. The time to fight is today, while we can still sway the agenda.

But let's step back a moment and look at how all this came to pass. The bishops owe their places in parliament to a serial killer. Henry VIII filled parliament with bishops because they were willing to give a religious seal of approval to him divorcing and murdering his wives – and they have lingered on through the centuries since, bragging about their own moral superiority at every turn.

Pore through the history books and you'll find they opposed almost all of the progressive changes in British history. The Suffragettes regarded them as such relentless enemies of equality for women they set fire to two of their churches. In 1965, the then-Archbishop of Canterbury scorned the people who were campaigning for nuclear-armed countries to step back from the brink, on the grounds that "a nuclear war would involve nothing more than the transition of many millions of people into the love of God, only a few years before they were going to find it anyway". In 2008, his successor, Rowan Williams, said it would be helpful if shariah law – with all its vicious misogyny, which says that women are worth half of a man – was integrated into British family courts.

Today, the bishops claim they are really motivated by concern for the poor and vulnerable. But which two bills have brought them out to vote in largest numbers in recent years? The first was to vote against the Equality Bill, which finally criminalized discrimination against gay people in the provision of services to the public. The bishops rallied and railed to keep it legal for people to effectively hang signs saying "No Gays" outside their shops, charities and hotels. They even threatened to shut down services helping the poor if they were required to give them to gay people – suggesting their much bragged-about opposition to poverty is pretty shallow.

The bishops' second greatest passion is to prevent you from being able to choose to end your suffering if you are dying. Some 81 per cent of British people believe that if you are terminally ill and can't bear to live any longer in an agony that won't cease, you should be allowed to ask a doctor to help you end it. If you believe this is "evil" – as the bishops do – that's fine: you can choose to stay alive to the bitter end, no matter how awful the pain becomes. That's your right. But for the bishops, that's not enough. They want to impose their conviction on the rest of Britain. They don't even speak for their own followers: the polling consistently finds huge majorities of Christians support euthanasia too.

The bishops didn't turn out to protect the poor and vulnerable. They turned out to hurt them. The Right Rev Lord Harries of Pentregarth declares he is there to show "Parliament is accountable not only to the electorate but to God". This is a surreal situation: Britain is one of the most blessedly irreligious societies on Earth, yet they are on a lonely shelf with Iran in handing a chunk of their parliament to clerics. The British Social Attitudes Survey, the most detailed study of public opinion, found that 59 per cent of British people say they are not religious. And remember: even 70 per cent of Protestant Christians say it's wrong for the bishops to have these seats.

Nick Clegg demonstrating how he gropes his wife

Nick Clegg promised before the election he would introduce a 100 per cent elected House of Lords – which would obviously mean an end to the bishops' privileges there. Yet now people close to him say he is going for only 80 per cent elected, with the bishops remaining on the undemocratic benches. And it gets worse. People close to him whisper he is planning to add even more unelected religious figures: an imam, the chief rabbi, and others, in pursuit of the multiculturalism the Prime Minister just disowned. So Britain may soon have the bizarre sight of an atheist Deputy Prime Minister expanding the number of unelected religious figures in their parliament in the name of "modernization".

Last week, David Cameron gave a speech telling British Muslims – rightly – that they had to support "equal rights regardless of race, sex or sexuality... This is what defines us as a society. To belong here is to believe in these things". Yet he has been a key defender behind the scenes of retaining the bishops in parliament, even though they explicitly oppose "equal rights regardless or race, sex, or sexuality." They refuse to allow women to hold the top jobs in their organization. They demanded an opt-out from laws banning discrimination against gay people, to allow individuals to express their "conscience" – a loophole so large it would render the law meaningless. Using Cameron's logic, they oppose "what defines us as a society" and do not "belong here", yet he is keeping them in a position of great unelected power. It seems his "muscular liberalism" only applies to people with brown skins.

The atheists and secularists who are campaigning for democracy are consistently branded "arrogant" by the bishops and their noisy cheerleaders. But who is arrogant here? Is it atheists who say that since we have no evidence about how the universe came into being, we should be humble, admit we don't know, and keep investigating? Or is it the bishops, who claim that they not only "know" how everything was created, but they know exactly what that Creator thinks, how he wants us to have sex, and which pills we can take when we are dying? What could be more arrogant than claiming you have a right to an unelected seat in parliament to impose beliefs for which there is no evidence on an unbelieving population?

None of this has to happen. Britain does not have to accept their laws being formulated by people they did not choose and do not support. But Nick Clegg needs to be pressured, fast. He has spent the last nine months shedding every principle he ever espoused. Is he now even going to abandon his atheism, and give the forces of organized religion yet more power over Britain? Mr Clegg, in the name of the God you and I don't believe in - step back from the bishops.

Is Freedom A Religious Idea?

In light of the continuing political uprising throughout the Middle East, American leaders are reported to be recalculating their approach to the Muslim world.

Politico's Ben Smith wrote this week that the Obama administration "clearly sees an opportunity," signaling "that they're hoping the changes in Tunisia and Egypt spread, and that they're going to align themselves far more clearly with the young, relatively secular masses" in countries like Iran, Algeria and Lebanon.

Is this a new moment for American relations with Muslim countries? 
Is freedom a religious or secular idea?

my parody to the popular I Am Free poster.

Is freedom a religious idea? As John McEnroe would have said, "You cannot be serious."

If you value freedom, you should flee from religion as the antelope flees the lion. Religion is the very antithesis of freedom, insisting on our complete subjugation to the unachievable demands of an invisible but supremely powerful overlord. Think of Islam, whose very name means 'submission'! Think of Christianity, which claims it is disobedience that brought original sin into the world, with all that entails in terms of suffering and injustice and even earthquakes and tsunamis. Imagine! To claim that human obedience is so imperative that the purposes of an omnipotent deity and the very fabric of the planet, if not the whole universe, depend upon it and can be catastrophically disrupted at the first whiff of rebellion - and then to claim that such a religion is the source of human freedom!

The Abrahamic god even enthusiastically endorses the vilest of all negations of freedom: slavery. In Leviticus 25, there is a direct quote from this supposedly perfect deity, specifically permitting the Israelites to take and keep slaves, the only proviso being that they must be from the neighboring tribes and not from their own people. Straight from the horse's mouth, as it were, and hardly a shining example of freedom as a religious ideal.

Religion delights in petty rules and the exercise of power over its followers. What theistic religion does not attempt to curtail believers' freedom with nonsensical decrees about foods that may or may not be eaten, fibers that may or may not be worn, days on which they may or may not work, coverings that must or must not be worn on their heads, books that must or must not be read, images that may or may not be created, words that may or may not be spoken, ideas they may or may not explore, actions they may or may not perform, rituals - whether physical or symbolic - they must perform in order to cleanse themselves of impurities of religion's own invention?

There is no aspect of our lives, no matter how intimate, which religion does not unblushingly insist on its right to control. Whom we may love, whom we may desire, with whom we may physically express those feelings: in such restrictions on our freedom religion is at its most insistent and intrusive. But it does not stop even here, for religion does not limit its control to our deeds or even words: no, the invisible Thought Police of religion do not scruple to pursue us even into the innermost recesses of our minds and there to stand ready to condemn us for our very thoughts. Not even the most heinous ruler or most brutal slave-owner ever achieved such extremes of tyranny; yet religion grants us no privacy, nowhere to hide, no freedom to entertain even a fleeting thought without its being immediately known to - and judged by - a cosmic dictator. Religion is the ultimate slavery: it is the slavery of the mind, slavery to the fear of divine judgment and damnation. The devilish irony consists in the fact that 'divine judgment' and 'damnation' are themselves the inventions of religion: religion creates and exquisitely perfects the fear, then cynically declares itself the sole and indispensable liberator from it.

And yet we are invited to credit religion as the source of true freedom? It is a laughable claim, a disgraceful claim, a claim that makes a mockery of language as well as of truth and of human dignity. As such it is on a par with other religious claims, such as those that define perfect forgiveness as something dependent on the barbaric sacrifice-by-crucifixion of an innocent man, perfect justice as consisting in the innocent being tortured to death so the guilty can be let off scot-free, and perfect love as something that would damn us to hell for all eternity if we refuse to accept such grotesque monstrosities as evidence of a perfect and loving god.

True freedom requires us to liberate ourselves from the tyranny of religion as well as from the tyranny of brutal earthly regimes. True freedom involves the freedom to think, to explore, to grow; the freedom to pursue knowledge and learning, wherever they lead; the freedom to be different, not to conform; freedom from bigotry; freedom from ignorance; freedom to love and to express that love as we choose; freedom to be ourselves, to accept ourselves, warts and all, and to accept others on the same terms; freedom to choose our own meaning and purpose in life, and to make our own decisions on the basis of those free choices; freedom to make mistakes; freedom to change our mind; freedom from fear, especially from phoney fears invented by those whose only aim is to control us in word, thought and deed.

Religion claims to set its followers free, while all the time holding them in thrall and insisting they kiss the hand of their jailer. There can be no true freedom so long as religion still keeps the human mind in shackles.

In Dumbfuck We Trust

Rep. J. Randy Forbes (R-VA-4th District) is determined to put his god in our nation's public schools, but that is not enough. He also wants to send a message to all Americans that ours is a nation under his god. I realize that Rep. Forbes started his efforts to get Congress to reaffirm the absurd "In God We Trust" motto last month, but things have been heating up, and it is time to grant him the recognition he deserves.

H. Con. Res. 13 goes beyond reaffirming "In God We Trust" as the national motto of the U.S. It encourages public display of this motto in all government buildings and public schools. You can read it for yourself here. And after you have done so, I encourage you to read this letter sent by the Secular Coalition for America to the House Judiciary Committee.

Quoting from the Secular Coalition's letter:

The resolution’s passage out of the House Judiciary Committee would continue to alienate millions of Americans from their government and encroach further on the nation’s tradition of separation of church and state.

I think that Alonzo Fyfe (Atheist Ethicist) is exactly right when he characterizes the message of this resolution as follows:

WE trust in God. Do you want to be one of us? Then trust in God. Do you not trust in God? Then you are not one of us.

That is indeed what is happening here. Regardless of whether Forbes himself sees this as mere pandering or something far more sinister, the impact is divisive. As Alonzo says,

This says to the world, "Of all of the things we value - of all of the things that identify us as Americans - we hold the principle of dividing citizens into classes based on their religious beliefs to be the most important."

Defeating the proposed reaffirmation of this motto is important, but really, the motto itself needs to be relegated to the dustbin of history. Rep. Forbes may be an idiot, but we who allow this sort of thing to continue must accept at least some of the blame.