It was turned in to a local radio station after being stolen this morning.

Details here.

The following is a special guest column by Valerie Tarico.

Reason’s Greetings!

Bill O’Reilly is in heaven, because the Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF) has given him a platform from which to launch his latest series of tirades about “The War on Christmas^TM.”   Alongside a manger scene and a holiday tree, the executive office building in Washington State now has a plaque that says, “At this season of the Winter Solstice, may reason prevail.”  It goes on to add: “There are no gods, no devils or angels, no heaven or hell.  There is only our natural world. Religion is but myth and superstition that hardens hearts and enslaves minds.” The sign was placed by ex-evangelist Dan Barker (author of Godless) on behalf of Washington members of the FFRF, an organization that works largely on separation of church and state.

As nontheist and a Washington State member of the FFRF, I have mixed feelings about the sign.  Not about the fact that it exists, mind you.  Our governor and attorney general have issued a joint statement:

The U.S. Supreme Court has been consistent and clear that, under the Constitution’s First Amendment, once government admits one religious display or viewpoint onto public property, it may not discriminate against the content of other displays, including the viewpoints of nonbelievers.

Well, thank goodness! 

For years Evangelical fundamentalists have driven their beliefs into the public square in the form of failed apocalyptic foreign policies, failed abstinence only sex ed, failed manufactroversies about climate change and evolution, and a failed bid to install a dominionist ditz in the vice presidency.  Many of us—Christians and nonChristians alike, are tired of their astounding sense of entitlement and frightened by how far it has gotten them.

That said, the sign is pretty in-your-face.  All right.  Very.

I honor Dan Barker’s work to call attention to the dark side of religion.  Month after month, he and his wife Annie Laurie Gaylor defend kids who are tormented at school because they aren’t Christians.  They give voice to young freethinkers.  They file anti-discrimination lawsuits.  They labor to keep science classes rigorous and social services fair. They compile news articles about fraud and violence and sexual abuse committed in the names of gods—and they can show you stacks of evidence that Catholic priests are not outliers.

I honor their work so much that I support it, and I gave up my Monday evening to interview Dan for a Seattle Community Access show called Moral Politics.  But, still, I have to ask, wasn’t the first sentence enough?

Throughout recorded history, winter solstice has been a time to celebrate.  Ancient agricultural cultures gave sacred significance to the return of light, the budding of new plant and animal life, a new cycle of plenty.  Their festivals had names such as Saturnalia, Yule and Lucia.  Some of them are celebrated to this day.  It was the special significance of the winter solstice that caused the Christian church to designate it as the birthday of Jesus.  Not only did it have the perfect connotations, representing as it did, the death and resurrection of the sun, it was already established as a birthday of gods. Prior to or during the time of Jesus, the Roman Attis, the Greek Dionysus, the Persian Mithra, and the Egyptian Osiris all had their birthdays celebrated on December 25.  Solstice really is the reason for the season. 

I wish that the FFRF had simply given secular voice to the wonder we all feel when, in the dark of winter, we experience the promise of warmth and beauty and new life.

Valerie Tarico is a psychologist and author in Seattle, Washington.  Her book The Dark Side, describes the rational and moral contradictions that caused her to abandon Evangelical fundamentalism. She is founder of www.WisdomCommons.org. 

Knowledge is an unending adventure at the edge of uncertainty.–Jacob Bronowski

www.wisdomcommons.org

The Daily Kos is reporting that Bill O’Reilly is brewing up a whole controversy over the atheist sign at city hall in Olympia WA:

Well…  not explicitly. 

You see, the Vatican generally opposes the death penalty. However, when the UN proposed a resolution to call on governments worldwide to decriminalize homosexuality, the Vatican said they would oppose it.

You read that right. The Vatican, the arguably most powerful religious institution in the world, doesn’t want to stop radical Islamic governments (and others) from regularly prosecuting and executing people if they diddle the wrong way.

Their justification?

It would “add new categories of those protected from discrimination.” Oh no! We wouldn’t want that! Protecting sexual minorities from discrimination (read: murder) must be one of Ratzinger’s new deadly sins.

Through some equivocal and roundabout reasoning, the Vatican figures that if we stop killing and arresting the gays, then it could result in “reverse discrimination against traditional heterosexual marriage.” Made to choose between sparing homosexuals from state-sponsored murder and granting them tax breaks and legal status, the Vatican doesn’t choose life.

Let there be no confusion – queer rights is the civil rights issue of the 21st century.

Why does the Secular Student Union exist? What need to we have of IHEU, CFI, and others? This is why. When seemingly benign dogmas lead a person to turn a blind eye to suffering, discrimination, and murder, they must be questioned and tried in the court of human dignity. The Vatican, a relic of an age where the value of a person was measured in tithes, is one of the great evils of our day – working to divide, control, subvert, and dominate the modern human spirit. They are guilty in some of the greatest crimes of omission of the past decade, from attacking condom use in Africa and implicitly spreading AIDS like wildfire to turning a blind eye to the state-sponsored murder of minorities.

We are beyond not needing the Vatican… we now need there to not be a Vatican, or for their dogmas to be so marginalized that they no longer hold power.

The SSU and rational humans across the globe have not yet finished fighting for human rights, and I don’t see this changing any time soon.

Now, on FOXnews.com – His Noodly Lordiness

When some of the world’s leading religious scholars gather in San Diego this weekend, pasta will be on the intellectual menu.

They’ll be talking about a satirical pseudo-deity called the Flying Spaghetti Monster, whose growing pop-culture fame gets laughs but also raises serious questions about the essence of religion.

The appearance of the Flying Spaghetti Monster on the agenda of the American Academy of Religion’s annual meeting gives a kind of scholarly imprimatur to a phenomenon that first emerged in 2005, during the debate in Kansas over whether intelligent design should be taught in public school sciences classes.

• Click here to visit FOXNews.com’s Evolution & Paleontology Center.
(Also news: FOX has an Evolution & Paleontology Center)

Supporters of intelligent design hold that the order and complexity of the universe is so great that science alone cannot explain it. The concept’s critics see it as faith masquerading as science.

An Oregon State physics graduate named Bobby Henderson stepped into the debate by sending a letter to the Kansas School Board.

With tongue in cheek, he purported to speak for 10 million followers of a being called the Flying Spaghetti Monster — and demanded equal time for their views.

“We have evidence that a Flying Spaghetti Monster created the universe. None of us, of course, were around to see it, but we have written accounts of it,” Henderson wrote.

As for scientific evidence to the contrary, “what our scientist does not realize is that every time he makes a measurement, the Flying Spaghetti Monster is there changing the results with His Noodly Appendage.”

• Click here to read the text of Henderson’s letter.

The letter made the rounds on the Internet, prompting laughter from some and vilification from others.

But it struck a chord and stuck around. In the great tradition of satire, its humor was in fact a clever and effective argument.

Between the lines, the point of the letter was this: There’s no more scientific basis for intelligent design than there is for the idea an omniscient creature made of pasta created the universe.

If intelligent design supporters could demand equal time in a science class, why not anyone else? The only reasonable solution is to put nothing into sciences classes but the best available science.

“I think we can all look forward to the time when these three theories are given equal time in our science classrooms across the country, and eventually the world; one third time for Intelligent Design, one third time for Flying Spaghetti Monsterism, and one third time for logical conjecture based on overwhelming observable evidence,” Henderson sarcastically concluded.

Kansas eventually repealed guidelines questioning the theory of evolution.

Meanwhile, Flying Spaghetti Monsterism (FSM-ism to its “adherents”) has thrived — particularly on college campuses and in Europe.

Henderson’s Web site has become a kind of cyber-watercooler for opponents of intelligent design.

• Click here for the more-or-less official Web site of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

Henderson did not respond to a request for comment. His Web site tracks meetings of FSM clubs (members dress up as pirates) and sells trinkets and bumper stickers.

“Pastafarians” — as followers call themselves — can also download computer screen-savers and wallpaper (one says: “WWFSMD?”) and can sample photographs that show “visions” of the divinity himself.

In one, the image of the carbohydrate creator is seen in a gnarl of dug-up tree roots.

It was the emergence of this community that attracted the attention of three young scholars at the University of Florida who study religion in popular culture.

They got to talking, and eventually managed to get a panel on FSM-ism on the agenda at one of the field’s most prestigious gatherings.

The title: “Evolutionary Controversy and a Side of Pasta: The Flying Spaghetti Monster and the Subversive Function of Religious Parody.”

“For a lot of people they’re just sort of fun responses to religion, or fun responses to organized religion. But I think it raises real questions about how people approach religion in their lives,” said Samuel Snyder, one of the three Florida graduate students who will give talks at the meeting next Monday along with Alyssa Beall of Syracuse University.

The presenters’ titles seem almost a parody themselves of academic jargon.

Snyder will speak about “Holy Pasta and Authentic Sauce: The Flying Spaghetti Monster’s Messy Implications for Theorizing Religion,” while Gavin Van Horn’s presentation is titled “Noodling around With Religion: Carnival Play, Monstrous Humor and the Noodly Master.”

Using a framework developed by literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin, Van Horn promises in his abstract to explore how, “in a carnivalesque fashion, the Flying Spaghetti Monster elevates the low (the bodily, the material, the inorganic) to bring down the high (the sacred, the religiously dogmatic, the culturally authoritative).”

The authors recognize the topic is a little light by the standards of the American Academy of Religion.

“You have to keep a sense of humor when you’re studying religion, especially in graduate school,” Van Horn said in a recent telephone interview. “Otherwise you’ll sink into depression pretty quickly.”

But they also insist it’s more than a joke.

Indeed, the tale of the Flying Spaghetti Monster and its followers cuts to the heart of the one of the thorniest questions in religious studies: What defines a religion? Does it require a genuine theological belief? Or simply a set of rituals and a community joining together as a way of signaling their cultural alliances to others?

In short, is an anti-religion like Flying Spaghetti Monsterism actually a religion?

Joining them on the panel will be David Chidester, a prominent and controversial academic at the University of Cape Town in South Africa who is interested in precisely such questions.

He has urged scholars looking for insights into the place of religion in culture and psychology to explore a wider range of human activities.

Examples include cheering for sports teams, joining Tupperware groups and the growing phenomenon of Internet-based religions.

His 2005 book “Authentic Fakes: Religion and American Popular Culture,” prompted wide debate about how far into popular culture religious studies scholars should venture.

Lucas Johnston, the third Florida student, argues the Flying Spaghetti Monsterism exhibits at least some of the traits of a traditional religion — including, perhaps, that deep human need to feel like there’s something bigger than oneself out there.

He recognized the point when his neighbor, a militant atheist who sports a pro-Darwin bumper sticker on her car, tried recently to start her car on a dying battery.

As she turned the key, she murmured under her breath: “Come on Spaghetti Monster!”

Dan Barker, President of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, former evangelical preacher, and author, is stopping by the UW on his way through Washington!

He’ll be speaking and signing books at the following place and time:

Kane Hall, Room 210
5:30PM – 7:30PM

Hope to see you all there!

Just today, in the news:

Wait Grandpa John, are you saying that if I accept Jesus, I’ll blow smoke out of my ass too?

———————–

Also:

Malaysia, the tolerant and forward nation in southeast Asia, has recently invoked the government to destroy a terrible threat to all of the Muslims. Yes, this threat has the power to corrupt and destroy, and is such a danger that it must be removed from the country permanently.

I’m talking, of course, about yoga.

Speaking of Dan Savage, here he is behaving badly on Anderson Cooper 360. He has trouble holding his tongue when the opposition’s arguments are so bad. But I’ll forgive him.

Dan Savage on AC360

I think NOVA is one of the best programs on television, and although I would recommend watching the program every Tuesday (or viewing the programs online), I think this Tuesday’s program should be especially interesting. The program is called “The Bible’s Buried Secrets,” and the program will present some basic Biblical scholarship to a lay audience (I wish I could say a “popular audience,” but I realize that PBS and NOVA are not exactly popular). I’m not expecting to see anything new, because that’s not really what NOVA does, but it should be interesting nonetheless.

This is how PBS is describing the program:

“In this landmark two-hour special, NOVA takes viewers on a fascinating scientific journey that began 3,000 years ago and continues today. The film presents the latest archeological scholarship from the Holy Land to explore the beginnings of modern religion and the origins of the Hebrew Bible, also known as the Old Testament.

“This archeological detective story tackles some of the biggest questions in biblical studies: Where did the ancient Israelites come from? Who wrote the Bible, when, and why? How did the worship of one God—the foundation of modern Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—emerge?”

The program is not out to prove or disprove the authenticity or reliability of the Bible (specifically the Hebrew Bible, or Old Testament), but to present the conclusions of Biblical scholars.

Watch a preview of the program here, and read additional information about the program. It will be broadcast on PBS, Channel 9, at 8 PM on Tuesday, November 18, and it will be available here afterward.

I should have posted this earlier, but I just watched a movie called “God on Trial,” produced jointly by the BBC and a PBS station in Boston. The movie is about a group of Jewish men facing death at Auschwitz who place God on trial for breach of contract. During the trial, they discuss many substantive issues, such as the problem of evil (theodicy) and the nature of God. While the film does not come out in favor of atheism, it also does not shy away from the issues we discuss at the SSU. I don’t know if PBS will run it again (it was on the Sunday night program Masterpiece), and it is not yet available on DVD, but I highly recommend it to everyone as soon as it becomes available.