January 3, 2016::End of the day round-up

3 Keys to Progress the Secular Community Needs in 2016

This involves removing yourself from your comfort zones. Displace yourself within circles you don’t normally frequent. Read and intermingle with queer, disabled, black and brown voices who share their thoughts, observations, experiences, and their grasp on the cultural context of their social relegation and erasure.

Books like God Is Not Great, The End of Faith, and The God Delusion are well-known, widely read, and often cited among nonbelievers. But how many have perused Godless Americana: Race and Religious Rebels, Why I Am Not a Muslim, The Ebony Exodus Project, or Writing God’s Obituary? What about books not geared towards atheism like What Does It Mean To Be White?, Sister Outsider, Critical Race Theory, or Between The World and Me? How many frequent the blogs or social media of transmen or transwomen who openly discuss their lived experiences or ex-Muslims not associated with “the establishment” that tenaciously tackle many manifestations of social inequalities like Kiran Opal, Sadaf Ali, and Heina Dadabhoy?

Watch This Short Irish Film About a Young Atheist Challenging Religious Authorities

Creationism evangelist: God put contradictions in the Bible to ‘weed out’ the atheists

 
Large Group Of Armed Militia Members Take Over Federal Building

Pakistan Censors International New York Times Article About Atheist Bloggers in Bangladesh

Sarah Palin found something else to quit — and it isn’t her asking for money

You May Be Fined in NYC for Calling Someone the “Wrong” Pronoun

America has lost any semblance of biblical thinking, and this is clearly showing up in the laws and regulations that are being established. Sinful behaviors are being applauded and protected in the courts, and those who choose to disagree with sinful lifestyles are being punished for refusing to condone or accommodate these choices. As our culture continues to reject God’s Word and do what’s right in its own eyes, we can only expect things like this to increase.

As Christians, we need to stand firmly and lovingly on God’s Word. In a culture that has utterly rejected our Creator’s words, it’s more important than ever that we stand boldly on God’s unchanging Word and speak truth,,,

What Leaving Religion Has Done for Me

As I approached adulthood, and began to meet people from different backgrounds, with different beliefs, faith faded and gave way to doubt. I’d always been a curious person, but my youthful shyness and anxiety, combined with my insular upbringing, kept me mostly isolated from the world beyond family and church. It wasn’t until I entered the workforce, and then attended junior college, that I discovered the wider world, one of dazzling variety, and found it suited my personality to a T.
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Many religions, including the brand of fundamentalist Catholicism in which I was raised, lead many adherents to restrict the education of their children to a cherry-picked, often distorted or flat-out-wrong, circumscribed array of ideas, scientific theories, and historical accounts that accord with the doctrines of their faith. Many of these children remain ignorant of the wider world of human thought and history until something in their experience or personality compels them to look beyond the teachings of their youth. For example, my own dear grandmother, out of love but misguided by her piety, did a disservice to the education of her grandchildren by attempting, and in some cases succeeding, to restrict our education in this way. Her religious beliefs led to her conviction that a broad, liberal education offered too many temptations to disbelief, so she felt compelled keep us from learning anything other than that which would accord with her fundamentalist Catholic faith. As I later discovered, she was right, not for the reasons she thought. Truth, in my opinion, holds fast in the face of challenges; it does not give way as easily as error does. Each new thing I learned, then, was not a temptation: it was a window of opportunity for growing in understanding, and for replacing bad ideas with better ones. Fortunately, I inherited, and was inspired by, her adventurous side, her love of people. Over time, I encountered and fell in love with the wider world of ideas, through the people I came to meet and the broader education I eventually received.

Jehovah’s Witnesses Publication Explains How to Shun Family Members

Hospital Refuses Pregnancy-Related Care Again Because of Religious Directives

The refusal of hospitals to allow doctors to perform basic health procedures based solely on religious doctrine presents a real threat to a woman’s ability to access health care. Patients seeking medical care from public institutions should not have to worry that religious doctrine rather than medical judgment will dictate what care they receive.

This image is an excellent way to refute the common "Hitler/Stalin/Mao killed because they were atheists" fallacy

The chart breaks down every death in the 20th century, including those caused by ideology.

Communism, fascism, democracy, Ba'athism and even Catholicism all make the ideology breakdown but atheism does not. That's because Hitler, Stalin, and Mao were not motivated by atheism.

If there is an omnipotent god, one that can end disease and cancer, he's got a lot to answer for. Also, this is just a really cool chart. Yes, I am a nerd.

[Source: http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/20th-century-death/]

Tea Parties As A Fundamentalist Religious Movement | Breitbart Unmasked

The other day the attached article was shared in a post by Rob Robertson of The Free World Project. (Please note that Rob and I are friends and we share similar thoughts in regards to politics, religion and the world in general.  As independent bloggers, we do our best to support each others' work).  The article is a response to a Jack Schwartz piece over at The Daily Beast The Tea Party Isn’t a Political Movement, It’s a Religious One.

But when religion is thrown into the mix, all that is lost. Religion here doesn’t mean theology but a distinct belief system which, in totality, provides basic answers regarding how to live one’s life, how society should function, how to deal with social and political issues, what is right and wrong, who should lead us, and who should not. It does so in ways that fulfill deep-seated emotional needs that, at their profoundest level, are devotional. Given the confusions of a secular world being rapidly transformed by technology, demography, and globalization, this movement has assumed a spiritual aspect whose adepts have undergone a religious experience which, if not in name, then in virtually every other aspect, can be considered a faith.

Seen in this light, the behavior of Tea Party adherents makes sense. Their zeal is not the mercurial enthusiasm of a traditional Republican or Democrat that waxes and wanes with the party’s fortunes, much less the average voter who may not exercise the franchise at every election. These people are true believers who turn out faithfully at the primaries, giving them political clout in great excess to their actual numbers. Collectively, this can make it appear as if they are preponderant, enabling their tribunes to declare that they represent the will of the American people.

Now here is what struck me, in light of this article posted previously, which discusses the mix of Randian economic ideologies with a social platform built on so-called on “Christian” values. (Keep this factoid in mind as you digest this. Rand railed against big government programs, calling for personal responsibility but yet was collecting social security when she died.)

While a traditional political party may have a line that it won’t cross,the Tea Party has a stone-engraved set of principles, all of which are sacrosanct. This is not a political platform to be negotiated but a catechism with only a single answer.  It is now a commonplace for Tea Party candidates to vow they won’t sacrifice an iota of their principles. In this light, shutting down the Government rather than bending on legislation becomes a moral imperative. While critics may decry such a tactic as “rule or ruin,” Tea Party brethren celebrate it, rather, as the act of a defiant Samson pulling down the pillars of the temple. For them, this is not demolition but reclamation, cleansing the sanctuary that has been profaned by liberals. They see themselves engaged in nothing less than a project of national salvation. The refusal to compromise is a watchword of their candidates who wear it as a badge of pride. This would seem disastrous in the give-and-take of politics but it is in keeping with sectarian religious doctrine. One doesn’t compromise on an article of faith.

This explains why the Tea Party faithful often appear to be so bellicose. You and I can have a reasonable disagreement about fiscal policy or foreign policy but if I attack your religious beliefs you will become understandably outraged. And if I challenge the credibility of your doctrine you will respond with righteous indignation. To question the validity of Moses parting the Red Sea or the Virgin Birth or Mohammed ascending to heaven on a flying horse is to confront the basis of a believer’s deepest values.

Consequently, on the issues of government, economics, race, and sex, the Tea Party promulgates a doctrine to which the faithful must subscribe. Democrats and independents who oppose their dogma are infidels. Republicans who don’t obey all the tenants are heretics, who are primaried rather than burned at the stake.

So let's take a look at what Matt Obsorne of Breitbart Unmasked has to say.

What I find intriguing in citing a 2011 PewResearch poll, "[t]he analysis shows that most people who agree with the religious right also support the Tea Party. But support for the Tea Party is not synonymous with support for the religious right."

While tea parties are a conservative brand born of the religious right, their fundamentalism is not identifiable by leaders, denominational identities, or even an explicit sectarianism. Instead, tea parties must be understood as a discrete, but related, phenomenon,,,

Rather than wait for a top-down counterrevolution against modernity, tea parties have turned our state governments into laboratories for tax cuts, climate change denial, “Agenda 21″ lunacy, anti-sharia laws, and most tellingly, another wave of creative new abortion restrictions.  The last one is significant, because tea party activists sometimes go to great lengths to deny the meaningfulness of their ideological overlap with the evangelical right, but in practice tea parties invariably default to the kind of patriarchal authoritarianism represented by the Hobby Lobby decision.

A point that also highlights the Dominionist Movement in some aspects, "Not all Christians are Dominionists, but all Dominonists claim Christianity." As there are those in the Realm that deny its existence or influence.

You might think this would create tensions with Christians, who are called upon to oppose the dehumanizing idolatry of mammon. Unlike their Jesus, the god of tea parties doesn’t care about social justice, or healing the sick, or caring for the poor. But so far, those dissonances have not disturbed the conservative culture war coalition in any appreciable way, nor am I holding my breath waiting to see it happen; their united, existential war against a godless 21st Century is simply far too important to them.

 (Oh look, there's Ayn Rand again!)

 Tea Parties As A Fundamentalist Religious Movement | Breitbart Unmasked