The following represents the views of a single member of the SSU, and does not necessarily represent the views of the SSU as a whole.

Cross-posted from the blog Figuring Shit Out

One argument I’ve been hearing about with increasing frequency from the atheist community is that “everyone is born atheist” with the implication that religion is some unwitting indoctrination forced upon children too young to object. To me, such an argument represents a shockingly naive tabula rasa view of human development and, what’s more, invalidates the significant intellectual achievements of atheism as an intellectual stance.

A far more accurate view of human development would reveal that “everyone is born animist”, that is, ascribing human like traits to naturalistic phenomena. Our propensity to find and explain patterns of behavior is a product of our deep evolutionary background and even in modern, technological society, we curse our computers as malicious and believe that we can influence the timing of traffic lights. All religion does is impose an organizational framework upon our original animist intuitions. It provides a ready explanation for what we were already pre-programmed to believe.

Only atheism seeks to directly challenge the validity of our animist intuition and promote a wholly naturalistic view of the world. As a result, atheism is a deeply counter intuitive claim and one which can only be justified by deep intellectual inquiry into rationalism, skepticism and the scientific method. The argument that “everyone is born atheist” wholly discredits the significant intellectual effort that atheists must take to reach an intellectually defensible point of view.

So let’s retire this tired old canard that “everyone is born atheist”. It’s intellectually embarrassing and gives a grossly inaccurate viewpoint to outsiders on what atheism actually is.

The following represents the views of a single member of the SSU, and does not necessarily represent the views of the SSU as a whole.

Mormonism is a man-made church.

It was created by a man, run by men (and I do mean men), and perpetuated by men. Like every other man-made organization on this planet, it has the capacity for great good. Unfortunately, it also has the capacity for great evil. Normally, the members of an organization can recognize this, and praise the good, while condemning the evil. This check on organizational power, however, doesn’t exist when those that make the decisions lay claim to divine authority – as the leaders of the Mormon church do. They demand unchallenged obedience, discourage listening to criticism (like this), and claim to have direct access to ultimate truth. The potential for harm is vast. 

Here, we see another harm passed down from the patriarchs, and one that I find particularly deplorable.

The following is a direct quote from the Young Women’s Manual, taken directly from the LDS website:

 

The following story illustrates how a young woman lost her chastity because she was not obedient to gospel principles.

Alice was thrilled to be invited to a party with all of her new friends. She knew several would be drinking, but she decided she would just say “No, thank you” if anyone offered her a drink.

At the party, several people offered her drinks. She refused the first few times, but she finally had one drink. This one drink multiplied into several. As the evening progressed, Alice lost her ability to control both her mind and her body. This loss was indeed heartbreaking because she later had to live with the reality that she had also lost her chastity.

 

Alice went to a party. She is a minor, and had significant amounts of alcohol pushed on her due to social pressure. She became so intoxicated that she was hardly conscious. What happened next is a textbook example of date rape. If a girl does not have the capacity to consent, it’s rape. So, what is the lesson is teaching?

…because she was not obedient to gospel principles.

It’s her fault. She’s the one to blame for being raped. 

This is a common message in Mormonism. Men just can’t control themselves, and are prone to extreme acts of violence such as rape – especially without being held back by their faith. Even then, they are bound to lose control, and women should expect that. They should fight back and resist, otherwise, men will just walk all over them. It’s a message that is so oppressive and degrading to both men and women that words escape me. 

This theme is reflected in the Mormon classic, the Miracle of Forgiveness by Spencer W. Kimball, a Mormon Prophet:

Also far-reaching is the effect of the loss of chastity. Once given or taken or stolen it can never be regained. Even in a forced contact such as rape or incest, the injured one is greatly outraged. If she has not cooperated and contributed to the foul deed, she is of course in a more favorable position. There is no condemnation where there is no voluntary participation. It is better to die in defending one’s virtue than to live having lost it without a struggle. (p. 196)

What would this say to a girl who has just been raped, a phsycological offense that knows no equal?

1. Once stolen, it can’t be regained. My chastity is gone. I am no longer chaste. I am a lesser person, tainted. Damaged goods. 
2. If you cooperate, it’s even worse. Did I cooperate? He said he would kill me if I didn’t, so I did. I am weak, and I allowed him to do it. I’m at least partly to blame. 
3. My virtue is inherently tied to my virginity? I’ve been raped. I’m no longer a virgin, and no longer virtuous. 
4. It is better to die in defending one’s virtue… my virtue is more valuable than my life? It’s more important that I’m chaste than alive? I could have done more, I could have resisted more. I’m to blame. My chastity is gone, and it would have be better for me to be dead than the unclean being I am now.

So paranoid of sex, these old white men in their ivory tower are, that they must condemn the victim of a rape if there was even a sliver of consent. I’m not even going to cover incest, which Kimball throws in with rape, but is even more vast and sweeping in the damage it causes.

I knew a Mormon girl who had been raped. The experience destroyed her, and shattered her confidence to the point that she became highly agoraphobic, and was loath to leave her home. She might have recovered, and someday be able to rebuild her life, even if it wasn’t completely… but for her local Mormon bishop. 

Think about it. 

If you survived a rape… if you lived… doesn’t that mean that you did not do enough to “defend your virtue?” Doesn’t the fact that you are alive mean that there was at least a little bit of consent on your part? Therefore, if you lived, you are at least partly to blame. Even if you lived somehow without any shred of consent, you may still be to blame. Were your clothes too revealing, and set off a man’s uncontrollable animal desire to rape you? Were you too flirtatious? Did you kiss him? Clearly, you must have opened the door at some point:

The victim must do all in his or her power to stop the abuse. Most often, the victim is innocent because of being disabled by fear or the power or authority of the offender. At some point in time, however, the Lord may prompt a victim to recognize a degree of responsibility for abuse. Your priesthood leader will help assess your responsibility so that, if needed, it can be addressed. Otherwise the seeds of guilt will remain and sprout into bitter fruit. Yet no matter what degree of responsibility, from absolutely none to increasing consent, the healing power of the atonement of Jesus Christ can provide a complete cure. Ensign, May, 1992 (emphasis added)

I’ve heard of something similar. During the witch-hunts, they had a test to determine if a woman was a witch. They would throw the poor woman into the water, and if she lived, she was a witch with the protection of Satan, and therefore should be burned at the stake. If she drowned, she was innocent, and her virtue is maintained.

I’m often asked why I would ever ‘attack’ religion, and why I don’t just live and let live. This is why.

It’s because 90% of Provo rapes go unreported. This might be why:

 

“She said something that blew me away. She said, ‘I should have died before I let him do that to me,’ ” Lemmon said. “I was troubled that she had to believe that.”

Lemmon read from a letter written by a BYU rape victim who shared a similar belief.

“I’m a perversion to the good saints of my church,” wrote the victim, who said she wished she were dead. Tragic thoughts like these are common among rape victims in Provo, Lemmon said.”

Deseret News: 90% of Rapes Not Reported to Police

 

This is also true across the state of Utah, which has higher rates of rape than the national average.

It’s heartbreaking. It’s enfuriating. This is the danger of unchecked dogma. This is real harm perpetrated in the name of an imagined deity. This is why I can’t, as an ethical person, just live and let live.

It’s not often I agree with him, but everything Bill O’Reilly describes in this article is precisely why I LOVE this city and state. Apparently we’re now gayer and more leftie-loony than San Francisco.

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!