Jeffrey Tayler continues his anti-theism in today’s Salon, and for him there’s no Geneva Convention in the war on faith. His piece, “They really want a theocracy: the GOP candidates who want to make you bow to their Lord,” is pretty much a reprise of his excellent talk at the Atheist Alliance of America a week ago. It may be preaching to the choir on this site, but Salon gets millions of views a week and has a history of attacking New Atheists, so it’s all to the good. I’ll give just three excerpts, one of which includes some shameful self-promotion on my part:
This is new to me:
A new PPP survey reveals that Republicans are afflicted most, with 44 percent now favoring installing Christianity as the United States’ official religion. (Lest we forget, the GOP’s roster of potential 2016 candidates is stocked with rabid believers, and even faith-faker Donald Trump is courting evangelicals.) A shocking 28 percent of Democrats are also theocratically inclined. Only 53 percent of Republican and Democratic voters combined oppose declaring Jesus jabberwocky our national faith.
The upshot: almost three out of four adult Americans would, in effect, junk the First Amendment, and with it, our gloriously godless system of governance.
I’m a bit unsure of the math here: if 53% of all voters oppose Christianity as our national faith, how does that translate into “three out of four adult Americans wanting to junk the First Amendment”? Regardless, the 44% and 28% figures are pretty shocking.
And I love this bit of rhetoric because, frankly, I’m tired of faitheists and apologists claiming that religion has nothing to do with inspiring bad actions. There are some actions, including killing blasphemers and heretics, foisting creationism on public schools, or killing your sick children via “faith healing”, that are virtually unimaginable without religion.
In the fight for free speech about religion, Islam presents us with semantic confusion stemming from the widely used balderdash terms Islamophobia and Islamophobic. Yet accepting the sort of pseudo-logic offered by denouncers of Islamophobia – that finding fault with the dogmas of Islam is racist – leads one to inescapably racistconclusions.
How so? Well, are Syrians and Iraqis just naturally prone to beheading people? They really would behead even without the Quran telling them to smite the infidels at their necks? Men in the Middle East are just born wife-beaters? Or might instructions on wife-beating in the Islamic canon have something to do with it?(We should recall there’s one and only one U.N. Convention on Human Rights. The Convention doesn’t make exceptions for culture or religion.)
The don’t-blame-religion trope also fails in the United States. Two examples suffice to prove this: is a certain County Clerk named Kim Davis just naturally inclined to deny same-sex couples their marriage licenses? Or might her Christian beliefs be involved? Are some loving parents congenitally disposed to deny their children medical care, and de facto murder them? Or does Christian Science have something to do with it? On the latter point, you might read Jerry Coyne’s “Faith Versus Fact,” if you have any doubt. But I’m sure you don’t.
Well, I appreciate the plug. The piece continues, and I’ll add one more bit, but read the rest for yourself:
We arrive at certain inevitable conclusions about what sort of person you have to be if you persist, despite the evidence, in believing in God. If you think little girls’ clitorises should be sliced off, then religion is for you. If you think holding one belief instead of another, or renouncing a belief, is a capital offense, then religion is for you. If you think an outbreak of atheism among ISIS’s ranks would do nothing to slow that group’s commission of atrocities, then religion is for you. If you think women need to wear a certain form of headgear or be considered whores, then religion is for you. If you hold that an aging, kindly-appearing male should rightfully hold sway over whether women can moderate their own reproductive cycles, then religion is for you. If you believe women should submit to their husbands as unto the Lord, then religion is for you. If you think the myths and nonsense embedded in the Bible qualify that book to serve as some sort of public-policy guidebook, then religion is for you. In short, if you’re incapable of thinking straight, and you’re willing to lead your life in accordance with wild metaphysical jibber-jabber, then religion, I’m sorry to say, is for you.
sub
screwed up first sub
here, have one of mine.
sub
thanks; ham and cheese?
Roast beef sub.
He apparently has quite an affinity for alliteration.
As always, a little alliteration alleviates almost all ailments.
b&
But I’d aver that overly-abundant alliteration can be awkward. Limited application is astute advice.
Evade excessive excesses? Execrable exhortation!
b&
and eschew excessive excesses, etc.
I absolutely agree.
Allegedly.
Need to? Of course not. But it’s so trivially easy to do!
I mean, the gods have unimaginable power and are the ultimate paragons of moral virtue, right? So why can’t they even be relied upon to call 9-1-1 in the midst of an unfolding crisis? Is it really too impossible a task even for the gods, or is there so much moral ambiguity over the question of what to do in an emergency, or are they so far out of touch that they don’t notice when something bad is happening?
And if the gods can’t even get something that obvious right…what use are they at all? Why even pretend that they’re gods, even if we grant their hypothetical existence?
b&
An omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent being has the power to prove his existence. Doesn’t. Checkmate theists.
Of course, then there’s the Douglas Adams argument that ends with proof denying faith and God disappearing in a puff of logic.
Atheists win either way. 🙂
“I’m a bit unsure of the math here: if 53% of all voters oppose Christianity as our national faith, how does that translate into “three out of four adult Americans wanting to junk the First Amendment”? ”
Maybe he transposed the “47%” to be “74%”?
Yes, it looks like an error — unless he’s including people who think “God” is either a ceremonial, metaphorical term or — more likely — that the generalized notion of “God” is shared by all Americans. We’re only divided when it comes to “religions” — how we specifically experience or interpret God. Christianity may or may not be the TRUE religion, but the existence of God is out of that debate.
I’ve seen a lot of that last one, usually accompanied by the insistence that God isn’t a religious viewpoint. It’s secular because there is no debate. God is a well-known fact, the only one which can provide all the background beliefs for Constitutional democracy, including the first amendment. So invoking God doesn’t — indeed it couldn’t — violate the first amendment. And by that reasoning, atheists would perforce be evil, stupid, or perverse and may safely be ignored.
Yes, the argument is bullshit, but there are a lot of theists who stand united on that one.
To me that underscores the correctness of attacking religious belief directly; you can’t rely on religious believers to soberly draw the appropriate line between Church and state. You need to kill the roots, not the branches.
Either that (74% instead of 47%), or Tayler just added the Democrat and GOP percentages by mistake: 44 + 28 = 72% = 3 out of 4.
Of course you can’t do that, assuming both parties have 50% of total support, you’d get
0.5 * 44 + 0.5 * 28 = 36%.
You cannot help but get fired up by Tayler’s writing. He refuses to pull punches on the ridiculously religious in this country and against all religions. He is a bright spot in a very troubled world.
Historian writing:
I think that polls reveal that Americans are just not consistent thinkers. Contradictions abound. The PPP poll that Jeffrey Tayler cited is certainly not encouraging. But, a PPP poll from early October discovered the following ( the three paragraphs between the dashed lines) in regard to Americans and religion.
—————
“-Pope Francis wrapped up his American tour with a 63/16 favorability rating. Last week’s Kim Davis drama doesn’t seem to have hurt him any with Democrats, as he gets a 75/8 rating from them. He is mostly popular with independents (60/21) and Republicans (49/23) as well.
Kim Davis, on the other hand, is not popular with just about anyone. Only 14% of voters nationally have a positive opinion of her to 35% with a negative one. It’s not surprising that she’s at 11/46 with Democrats, but even among Republicans she is not well liked with 16% rating her favorably to 23% with a negative view.
The limited tolerance for Davis may speak to the country’s belief that gay marriage just hasn’t proven to be a big deal. Only 26% of voters nationally claim that its being legal has had a negative impact on their lives, compared to 74% who say it’s either had a positive impact or none at all. Even among Republican voters, 57% say gay marriage being legal hasn’t negatively affected them.”
http://www.publicpolicypolling.com/main/2015/10/americans-dont-like-kevin-mccarthy-kim-davis-attacks-on-planned-parenthood.html
Kim Davis is vastly unpopular.
——————-
The fundamentalist crusade against gay marriage has failed as well. The 26% that claim gay marriage has had a negative impact on their lives must be composed of the ultra-religious. Unfortunately, this group is vastly influential within the Republican Party and is behind Ben Carson’s recent surge. The House Republicans may soon be holding hearings on Planned Parenthood. This is but another example of the hold of the religious right on the party. Simultaneous, they apparently have no qualms on repudiating the national debt, which could result in a worldwide economic calamity. These people are highly dangerous, but I suspect that the American people as a whole do not understand this. So, the country lurches from one unnecessary crisis to another.
The Pope remains quite popular in this country, more with Democrats than Republicans. It appears that most Americans have bought into the liberal image he is trying to project. Nevertheless, even the minimally substantive reforms that he is trying to enact as run into stiff opposition from Church conservatives. Do not expect major changes within the Catholic Church any time soon.
I say, let Ben Carson surge on!
(see what I did there?)
Ouch!
I’m glad he pointed out that the regressive left idea that “it’s not the religion but just bad people using religion as an excuse” means that there is a disproportionate number of bad people living in the middle east.
Over here on the atheist side, we blame a thing not people. Even the terrorists are victims of a religion not innately evil souls. The regressive left’s position seems to have a lot in common with the idea of original sin and the fall of man. This misanthropic idea that humans are just awful and the world would be a better place without us.
Depends on what “atheist side” you are talking about. Religion is the framework from which humans use to gain control and exert control from laws to ad hoc bad treatment. And certainly in our elections since they force their perverse views on what is good onto every candidate. You cannot be an Atheist and win in most if not all elections local, state or Federal. Even Islam rates above Atheists.
Since there really are admittedly irrational forms of hatred against Muslims (think of people in the U.S. trying to prevent mosques being built or beating up people who “look” Islamic) whether or not “Islamophobia” is a balderdash term is debatable. When I challenged him on this at the convention, he explained that the word “Islamophobia” was recently invented by Muslim clerics who were eager to couple genuine racism or bigotry with any criticism of Islam or Islamic actions at all. It was deliberately coined as a deepity in order to sow confusion.
Maybe, but I’d love to see his evidence that. Wikipedia says it’s been used since the 19th century. It seems to me that there are many ‘Islamophobias’ — some valid, some balderdash. Denying its existence flat out might just play into the hands of people who want to accuse atheism of bigotry.
I agree. The problem is not the word Islamophobia. The problem is the conflation of rational criticism of Islamic doctrines with irrational bigotry against Muslims. If there were a different term for anti-Muslim bigotry, apologists for Islamism would simply abuse that new term in the exact same way.
Xtian Scientist, JWs to a lesser extent. Are there any no-Xtian loopie-fruit communities that follow this derangement? I wouldn’t be surprised if there were. For a start, the offspring of Xtianity which is Mormonism has some major fruit loops in it’s outer reaches. And there are people like the Raelians (how’s the human-cloning project coming on, guys?).
I wouldn’t be surprised if there were some deaths amongst the ultra-vegan macrobiotic food freaks too – they have many of the characteristics of cults without being particularly religious in a conventional sense.
Ah, there’s the magic word we’re looking for : cults. There are plenty of religious cults, but there are a good number of non-religious cults out there. And one of their badges of culthood is resisting the penetration of outsiders, of which medical professionals are prime examples, particularly when kids are involved.
Just to spread the opprobium around a little more evenly, I could point to the (very cultish) Boko Haram people in northern Nigeria with their habit of killing vaccination workers, particularly for the polio eradication programme. No connection to other anti-vaxx cults in the rest of the world there.
I can’t think of a suitable example from Hinduism … Hbut there’s that significant, considerably religion-based Indian problem of the Three Deadly Words, “It’s a Girl”. Not exclusively an Indian, or solely a religion-driven, issue, but certainly part of the wider scope.
Another fruitloops cult is The Followers of Christ based in Oregon with members in Boise Idaho. The local Boise station did a very nice expose over several years documenting the continuing unnecessary deaths of children:
http://www.katu.com/news/investigators/Fallen-followers-Investigation-finds-10-more-dead-children-of-faith-healers-231050911.html?tab=video&c=y
Another disturbing thing I saw in that PPP survey is that 35% of Republicans want to make Islam illegal, even though 95% said they supported the 1st Amendment. Some people are more equal than others it seems.
It seems to me that a lot of Republicans really are interpreting freedom of speech and religion in exactly the way many of us say they are: to them it’s the right of the majority to impose their religion on all. One country under God and all that.
15% of Democrats and 20% of Independents also thought Islam should be illegal. This is no different from the position in Sharia of atheism and apostasy being crimes.
Did the survey ask how many of them thought atheism should be illegal?
Just wondering.
cr
No. I can just imagine people answering that one. I think a majority might be, ahem, kind enough to say we’re allowed to exist, but I bet there’d be a lot of really long pauses before they answered.
Taking theist on and potentially to millions of readers is very good news. Letting believers know with harassing reminders is a good strategy. Unless your killing, shouting, creating confusion and destroying your not much to listen to.
It is misery that talks to these people and misery is not what atheist declare or want. Atheism is deemed a life with no morals, no guidance, no hope, an abomination and pretty much by all believers.
The kicker is, we are none of these things, yet there is a complete failure to even acknowledge this the threat to a believing existence is so high.
So shoving it back in their collective face
seems only fair.
I love this guy. He’s a little like Bernie, just telling it like it is, doesn’t care who he pisses off.
Funny (not really), respondents who consider themselves Conservative or Very Conservative are 2 to 3 times more likely to defend outlawing Islam in the US than are those identifying themselves as Very Liberal. (W. Benson)