Defeat for Separation of Church and State

http://www.todaystmj4.com/news/local/92179769.html

A case to have a nativity scene removed from public property has been dismissed:

“A judge has dismissed a lawsuit that tried to prevent Manitowoc County from displaying a Nativity scene on the courthouse lawn during the Christmas season.

U.S. District Judge William Griesbach says the lawsuit filed by the Freedom From Religion Foundation has been rendered moot.

He says the county's new policy will allow all citizens to seek permits to have displays on the courthouse grounds regardless of their religious or political content.

The foundation, a Madison-based group of atheists and agnostics, argued the county violated the separation of church and state by allowing a Catholic group to erect the Nativity scene for decades.”

Obama Hatred: The Religion

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1165443.html

Obama hatred is alive and well in Israel. Bradley Burston calls it a religion:

“When I was young, I was taught that the purpose of religion was to foster compassion through lovingkindness, to seek peace by example, to perform with human hands the work of angels.

Then I moved to the Holy Land.

If ever the history of religion were written in blood, it was here. If ever religion has drowned history in blood, this is the venue. If ever the sword has beaten the plowshare, whether brandished along with the Old Testament, the New, or the Koran - we can show you the spot. And, more recently, if ever religion has succeeded in keeping peace, reconciliation, even the United Nations and the United States, at bay, ours is the place and time.

So it should have come as no surprise, I suppose, that a cluster of people here, people who cloak themselves in the garb of the pious, have decided to marry their furious loathing of Barack Obama to the custom of their faith, and to do what some in America have been doing for more than a year now: Hating Barack Obama as a new form of religious observance.

Once, on the holiday of Lag B'Omer, which falls this Saturday night, children cast into bonfires images of Adolf Hitler and others who have preached and in some cases practiced the mass killing of Jews.

This year, ahead of the Saturday night observance, professed followers of Meir Kahane have openly boasted of preparing effigies of the American president for distribution and incineration in bonfires across the country.

"There is no doubt that now the enemy of the Jewish people is Barack Hussein Obama," said pro-Kahane activist Noam Federman, a leader of the campaign.

"Obama is the most anti-Semitic president the U.S. has ever had," Federman told Maariv daily's website last week. "The time had come for our blind politicians to wake up and understand that you can't make policy according to the obsession of an Israel-hater."

These are not the rational people who oppose, take issue and disagree with Obama over his policies, his views, his performance. Not at all. These are the people who execrate the man, who despise him with every cell of their being, whose rage at his very name roars like napalm.

The irrational, some might say, rapturous hatred of Obama is not new, of course. Nor are the sulphur and the poison which inform Obama's revilers in the pro-Israel hard right.

Until now, though, many in the Obama-hate movement have confined their religious revivals to the relative privacy and safety of the Mother Church of All Satans, the internet.

The Kahanists, the dedicated Luddites of Zionism, have little use for discretion. They take their obscenity public at every opportunity. This one, however, is, even for them, a whole new level of low.

Part of it is the imagery. Fire is to the Jewish imagination what rope is to the African-American.

But that is only part of it. Because, wherever it is - whether the issue is health care, student loans, immigration policy or settling East Jerusalem - when taken to the extreme, the religion of reviling Obama is, at its core, the sacrament of hatred.

For that reason, it matters little that extremists can practice so-exisistence in hating Obama's guts, whether they may see themselves as God-fearing Jews or God-fearing anti-Semites.

What has Barack Obama done to the Kahanists, or, for that matter, to Israel and the Jews as a whole? He has endorsed a two-state solution - something which George Bush also did. Obama has pushed for a settlement freeze [Bush's road map, Phase One, includes the clause: "Israel also freezes all settlement activity"]. And, in a precedent which somehow also managed to draw the ire of Obama-haters, he has held Passover seders at the White House, which neither Bush nor any other president ever had.

What the Kahanists are saying, in effect, is that there is no longer any difference between the Occupation on one hand, and Judaism on the other.

In that sense, one may reasonably view the pro-Kahane camp as among them worst anti-Semites of all.

"That Hussein Obama who wants to freeze construction in Jerusalem every minute, he would even like to just freeze Israel over. He pretends to be a friend but actually he loves Islam. He is an anti-Semite, nothing less," Kahane disciple and effigy maker Bentzy Gobstein told Israel Army Radio last Thursday.

"We want to educate children while they are small," Gobstein continued. "When you burn it, have a Lag B'Omer bonfire with children - education begins with children.

"We want to teach them that we have to trust God, not Obama."

What is it, in the hearts of these people, who call themselves religious, whom the love or the fear of God should have filled with an openness toward humankind, that makes them hate this man with such fury?

Why is this President different from all other presidents?

They call him every manner of names - Communist, Muslim, racist, Jew-hater. They call him all manner of names, and he is none of these.

Cuurious, isn't it, that they never mention what he actually is. Which is, for many of them, enough reason to revile him, all by itself: Black.”

Here is more proof of how the right of Israel and America are so intertwined with each other. Both believe in this irrational nonsense.

Bad Science with Deepak Chopra

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2010/04/26/chopra042610.DTL

In a recent article titled “Is it time to quit believing?” Deepak Chopra argues that a belief in God can lead to a search for evidence for God. He bases this idea on the lecture of William James:

“In 1896, long before brain imaging and the discovery of DNA, the famous Harvard philosopher and psychologist William James published a famous lecture called "The Will to Believe." It contains one idea that is a revelation. James found a way for science to lead to God instead of defeating God. Let me give the revelation a context. James thought that people had a right, perhaps even a drive, to say that God existed, and even though they couldn't offer evidence for their religious beliefs, it sustained them with comfort, hope, and so on.

Atheists scoff at this rationale, claiming that it's childish to fall back on fairy tales about God just because they make you feel better. Far better to grow up and see what's before your eyes: the material world operating through random chance without the slightest sign of a higher intelligence, moral authority, afterlife, and all the other trappings of religion. But James was ahead of this argument.

He asked, what if believing in God actually makes new evidence appear? That was the revelation, because while believing in ghosts or Cinderella won't make either one appear (so far as we know), God is an aspect of our own consciousness. The deity is continuous with the human mind. When Jesus said, "Seek the kingdom of Heaven within," he was pointing to this very continuity. I am paraphrasing James and to some extent going beyond his lecture. But what fascinates me is that he hit upon a familiar notion among seekers today: "You will only see it if you believe it."”

Ignoring the obvious scientific problem with this argument, that you are starting with a theory and collecting evidence to prove the idea, it is best that we look at James’ argument itself.

"The Will to Believe" was a lecture delivered by William James, first published in 1896, which defended the adoption of beliefs as hypotheses and self-fulfilling prophecies even without prior evidence of their truth. Many philosophers would agree with James that we have a right to hypothesize and to adopt self-fulfilling beliefs without evidence; James, however, extends this idea to argue that, using this doctrine, adopting beliefs like God, freewill, possibility, and morality would cause evidence to come into existence, thus verifying beliefs that could not have been verified otherwise. James' rationale for this more controversial idea is in combining it with his pragmatic theory of truth, the idea that a belief is verified if it causes better interaction with the world. For example, while one may have some doubts as to the existence of God, the adoption of such a belief as a hypothesis, even without finding evidence to remove all doubt, would cause one to succeed better in the world, thus verifying the belief. This does not entail that it will be verified for everyone, but rather, for many, that it would cause their lives to be better, thus making it true for them (see James' pluralism regarding truth).” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Will_to_Believe)

The concept is based on bad science. While it may not be going quite as far to say that one can imagine God into existence, it does turn God into this thing that is simply, out there. If we keep searching, eventually we will find it, whatever ‘it’ may be. This is why people like Chopra hide behind the smokescreen of their words. Using phrases such as, “aspect of our own consciousness” it makes it more difficult to define God. When you leave the concept wide open it is harder to disprove, though easy to prove if any evidence fits this wide concept. Reading Chopra’s arguments I always have difficulty figuring out what exactly it is he’s talking about. I suspect many theists feel the same way and I’m sure he wants it that way.

Bertrand Russell pointed out a major flaw in “The Will to Believe” argument:

“The Inquisition rejected Galileo's doctrine because it considered it untrue; but Hitler accepts or rejects doctrines on political grounds, without bringing in the notion of truth or falsehood. Poor William James, who invented this point of view, would be horrified at the use which is made of it; but when once the conception of objective truth is abandoned, it is clear that the question, 'what shall I believe?' is one to be settled, as I wrote in 1907, by 'the appeal to force and the arbitrament of the big battalions,' not by the methods of either theology or science” (Bertrand Russell, "The Ancestry of Fascism", in The Will to Doubt, 1958, p102)

James’ argument doesn’t seem to acknowledge the possibility that the evidence could lead to a falsification of God. Whether or not you believe in the truth of your belief is based on your personal perception. It’s bad science.

National Christian Prayer Day II

http://www.sltrib.com/faith/ci_14984488

Is the National Prayer Day unconstitutional?

“Crabb's ruling is flawed.

The Establishment Clause bars the government from passing legislation to create an official religion or preferring one religion over another. The prayer proclamation makes no attempt to do either. In fact, the 2009 National Day of Prayer proclamation signed by President Barack Obama makes reference to "all great religions."”
So what about the non-religious? Notwithstanding Obama’s proclamation, the event was a Christian one during the Bush years and many on the right will continue to insist that’s the case.

“Nothing in the proclamation precludes those who do not believe in prayer from abstaining. Furthermore, each religious group can ignore or recognize the day in its own way.”

Right, no one is being forced to participate but the government is still endorsing a religious position and saying that religion is better than no religion.

“For evangelicals, the National Day of Prayer is not only an acknowledgment of our nation's history but a plea for God to guide us through our future as he guided our founders through the past.”

Why is a government sanctioned day needed to plea to God? True believers would pray each and every day regardless of whether government approved of it.
To answer the question: yes it is unconstitutional. It is still an endorsement of religion, even if it endorses all religions.

National Christian Prayer Day

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2010/04/national-prayer-day/39707/

The National Prayer Day is a Christian event through and through:

“Expect National Prayer Day to be distinguished by particularly splashy displays of piety this year, thanks to a recent federal district court decision declaring congressional designation of an official prayer day unconstitutional -- a violation of First Amendment prohibitions on establishing religion. In a lengthy, carefully reasoned decision (in Freedom from Religion Foundation v Obama), Judge Barbara Crabb stressed that this particular government endorsement of a particular religious practice has absolutely no secular purpose, but she stayed an injunction of Prayer Day pending the predictable appeal of her decision. So, religious people who think they need government permission and participation to pray, or those who simply seek government applause for praying, can still look forward to this year's official celebrations of prayer on May 6th.

I suspect they can probably look forward to the same celebration next year and in many years to follow. The Justice Department quickly announced its intent to appeal, to higher judicial powers at least, and should this case eventually make its way to the Supreme Court (as it might if the Court of Appeals upholds the lower court), it seems likely to result in a final ruling affirming congressional power to declare a national day of prayer. Or so secularists might hope: a final Supreme Court ruling invalidating Prayer Day would sorely tempt Congress and the states to pass a constitutional amendment qualifying the First Amendment ban on establishing religion.

In offering this prediction, I am not criticizing the District Court decision, which I found persuasive, legally sound, and sensitive to the danger of National Prayer Day generating precisely the sort of sectarian religious strife that the Founders sought to avoid when they barred state established religions. Judge Crabb cited numerous complaints from members of minority faiths about the "hi-jacking" of Prayer Day by conservative Christians. Joel Oster, Senior Legal Counsel of the Alliance Defense Fund (ADF), disputes the prevalence of these complaints, suggesting that they are isolated incidents instigated by "special interest groups that create their own devisiveness." But it is indisputable that the conservative National Day of Prayer Task Force, chaired by Shirley Dobson, (wife of Focus on the Family Founder James Dobson) has played a leading role in recent Prayer Days. (Dobson was initially named in the Prayer Day challenge; ADF represented her and won dismissal of all claims against her.)

Why was Dobson, a private citizen, ever included in this challenge to government power? President George W. Bush allowed Dobson's task force to take charge of National Prayer Day, as Steven Waldman writes, which greatly undermined any pretense that it was a non-sectarian celebration of religiosity: the Task Force's mission includes commitments to "Foster unity within the Christian Church" and "Publicize and preserve America's Christian Heritage." It pays rhetorical tribute to unspecified "Judeo-Christian" principles (which still exclude many religious and irreligious minorities,) but the Task Force's volunteer application form makes its rigid sectarianism quite clear: prospective volunteers are asked to affirm that "the Holy Bible is the inerrant word of the Living God" and that "Jesus Christ is the Son of God and the only One by which I can achieve salvation."

It's not surprising that the ecumenically inclined President Obama has a much more attenuated relationship with this most un-ecumenical Task Force and equally unsurprising that the Task Force has attacked him for not holding formal Prayer Day events (in which it might be featured). Last year, Obama compounded this insult, or injury, by issuing a National Prayer Day Proclamation deemed "secular in nature" by Brent Bozell's CNS.news.com, which stressed that the president only mentioned God once, "refers to people who don't believe in God," and "does not refer to the Bible but to the "Golden Rule" -- or the 'ethic of reciprocity' sometimes linked to verses in the Bible and other religious books." But, underscoring the divisiveness occasioned by an official prayer day, the Interfaith Alliance has praised Obama's 2009 proclamation for its "inclusiveness," lamenting that in "past years the National Day of Prayer was taken over by a group of religious exclusivists led by Shirley Dobson of Focus on the Family. In past years Mrs. Dobson's group, the National Day of Prayer Task Force has represented itself in a way that led many to believe that they were the government sanctioned National Day of Prayer organizers."

This was the political battle into which the Freedom From Religion Foundation tossed the grenade of a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of a 1952 federal law requiring the President to designate a National Day of Prayer. (In 1988, Congress named the first Thursday in May as Prayer Day.) Judge Crabb dismissed the predictable justifications for Prayer Day: it is not simply an innocuous act of ceremonial deism; encouraging Americans to pray is qualitatively different from printing in God We Trust on our dollar bills. It is not clearly supported by historical precedent (the various Thanksgiving Day proclamations dating back to 1789 served a "secular purpose of giving thanks" and did not actively encourage all citizens to pray or "help particular religious groups organize"); and it is not saved by an appearance of non-sectarianism. Putting aside the virtual impossibility of a non-sectarian prayer proclamation (diverse religions do not have a unified theory of prayer) and assuming the non-denominationalism of National Prayer Day, "the government's religious conduct cannot survive scrutiny under the establishment clause simply because it endorses multiple religions instead of one," Judge Crabb observed.

What's the harm of National Prayer Day? It equates prayerfulness and patriotism, as its congressional history makes clear; it sends a "message of exclusion" to religious minorities and other heretics, and, again, it threatens sectarian divisiveness. What's the harm of invalidating Prayer Day? National Prayer Day Task Force leader Shirley Dobson hysterically characterized the District Court decision as an "an attack upon our religious freedoms," but Dobson would remain free to pray the first Thursday in May and every other day of the year in the absence of an official prayer day. The Alliance Defense Fund claims that "National Prayer Day provides an opportunity for all Americans to pray voluntarily according to their own faith." Not exactly. The First Amendment provides all Americans with the freedom to pray "according to their own faiths" and the freedom to create their own opportunities for prayer without government interference; and these fundamental freedoms are more likely to be threatened than enhanced by government sponsorship of prayer. When some Americans seek congressional or presidential approval of their prayers, they're not seeking religious liberty but religious power, or influence at least, over other Americans of different faiths.

Shirley Dobson may believe her own rhetoric and may even feel oppressed by the absence of an invitation to pray with the president, but Alliance Defense Fund lawyers seem smart enough to know (and politic enough not to concede) that religious liberty is not contingent on an official prayer day. So what is at stake in this litigation? National Prayer Day is important because "it's part of our history," ADF lawyer Joel Oster stresses. An attack on Prayer Day "is an attack on history." Oster scoffs at Judge Crabb's efforts to distinguish presidential Thanksgiving Day proclamations by denying that they constituted calls to pray, and he points out that the Judge herself did not rely on her interpretation of these proclamations or other historic examples of official religious exercises. "She hit the nail on the head when she said she didn't care about history," he asserts, and he's right that this case is partly about history and its role in constitutional interpretation.

The view of America as a Christian nation, founded on Christian principles is quite controversial, to say the least, and reflects some unsupportable revisionist history (exemplified by the Texas Board of Education textbook standards that delete Thomas Jefferson from a list of influential political thinkers). But putting that controversy aside, or even conceding for the sake of argument the presumptive Christianity of a few Founders, the hard question remains: what difference should it make to judges interpreting the Constitution today? Are historical customs and ideals reference points, or mandates?

Judge Crabb unequivocally rejected the proposition that "religious conduct that would otherwise violate the establishment clause may be upheld for the sole reason that the practice has a long history...If one were to read the establishment clause as permitting any practice in existence around the time of the framers, this would likely mean that the government would be free to discriminate against all non-Christians." So, while "early Congress's political actions" are "relevant," she observes (quoting Justice Souter,) they are not "determinative ... of constitutional meaning." This view is countered by the originalist approach to constitutional jurisprudence, articulated most famously by Justice Scalia and shared by ADF's Joel Oster. In his view, the First Amendment's ban on established religion was "only intended to prohibit a state church," not official religious exercises, like prayer or Ten Commandment displays.

Oster and other advocates of official religiosity (and official Christianity in particular) aim to reverse the "last fifty years or so" of establishment clause rulings, which they regard as "inconsistent" with the Founder's intent. In this view, the Supreme Court's 1962 decision invalidating the New York State school prayer marked the beginning of a radical departure from the path of constitutional righteousness. (I recited this prayer resentfully every day, throughout elementary school, although I can't say I was harmed, much less indoctrinated by it (which didn't make it right). Instead, compulsory recitation of the prayer, followed by the Pledge of Allegiance, only increased my sense of alienation from religion and nurtured a healthy distrust of nationalism and other collectivisms.)

Official school prayers seem unlikely to be reinstated, thanks partly to the difficulty of fashioning one prayer that satisfies all prayerful and politically influential religionists. But the Supreme Court is gradually adopting a more permissive view of government sponsored religious activities. It's progress, or regress, is fitful -- in 2005, the Court ruled for and against two respective official Ten Commandment displays -- but the trend seems clear. Just this week, in Salazar v Buono, the Court upheld a controversial congressional land transfer designed to allow a large cross to remain on display in the Mojave National Preserve. In 2007, in Hein v Freedom from Religion Foundation, the Court struck down FFRF's challenge to executive branch expenditures in support of the Bush Administration's "faith-based" initiatives.

The Hein case was instructive, but its lessons may have been lost on FFRF when it challenged the National Day of Prayer. The decision to initiate a constitutional challenge like this should be strategic as well as principled, involving political calculations as well as legal analysis and focusing partly on the consequences of winning or losing. The Supreme Court is not entirely sympathetic to secularism or enthusiastic about separating church and state. An important legal victory for secularists in a lower federal court can be transformed into a costly legal defeat by the Supremes. In Hein, FFRF won a round in the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals, but ultimately it succeeded only in advancing the aims of its religious opponents, when the Supreme Court reversed on appeal and used the occasion to limit the rights of FFRF and taxpayers, in general, to challenge presidential violations of the establishment clause. The court didn't reach the merits of FFRF's claim; it simply shut the courthouse door in its face.

I'd be pleased to be proven wrong in predicting a similar outcome in FFRF v Obama, the National Prayer Day case, which, in my view, was rightly decided by the District Court. But the legal principles and precedents governing establishment clause cases are contested, and judges tend to apply them according to their own religious and civic values, as well as their views of history and constitutional jurisprudence.

Justice Scalia, for example, believes that "governmental invocation of God is not an establishment;" he is sympathetic to "the interest of the overwhelming majority of religious believers in being able to give God thanks and supplication as a people," and he is utterly unconcerned with the feelings of exclusion claimed by non-believers and members of religious minorities in establishment clause challenges: the First Amendment "permits (the) disregard of polytheists and believers in unconcerned deities, just as it permits the disregard of devout atheists." (It's tempting to attribute Scalia's disdain for the feelings of atheists and other minorities to his own religiosity, but he is generally impatient with "touch-feely" claims of harm, Dahlia Lithwick points out.)

What's wrong with Scalia's approach? He is not proposing to deny religious minorities the right to practice their religions, and while he is quite dismissive of irreligious people, he is not proposing official campaigns to convert them. He is demanding that people of minority faiths and no faiths learn to tolerate their feelings of alienation and exclusion occasioned by official alignment with the religious majority. He values the majority's desire for civic expressions of faith and the comfort derived from them over the minority's desire for inclusion; (so he does value some feelings after all).

Should the majority rule in cases involving official religious displays, invocations, or a congressionally mandated day of prayer? General references to God on our currency don't have much practical effect on the exercise of anyone's liberty, although they do irritate some secularists. I'd agree with Justice Scalia that we don't have a constitutional right not to be irritated; nor should we expect the government to protect us from feeling alienated. But we do have a right to be free of official orthodoxies. Where does an irritation or a "feeling of exclusion" end and the imposition of orthodoxies begin? The Supreme Court could find an opportunity to consider that question again in FFRF v Obama; and if, by some miracle, the Court eventually strikes down National Prayer Day, it might just make a believer out of me.”

Godless Liberals?

http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/spirited_atheist/2010/04/atheists_irreligiously_united_politically_divided.html

Susan Jacoby on the incorrect assumption that all atheists are big-government loving liberals:

“In the United States, largely as a result of the relatively recent, post-1980 alliance between the political and religious right, atheism and secularism have come to be identified in the public mind with political liberalism. "Secular liberal" is an epithet to the anti-intellectual segment of the right, which--as a number of conservative intellectuals have pointed out recently--is in the driver's seat among angry conservatives today. Implicit in this epithet is the belief that liberalism, secularism, and a liking for big government are linked. Nothing could be more ahistorical or less accurate about present-day secular America.

As regular readers of this blog know, I am both an atheist and a political liberal. I actually prefer to describe myself as a freethinker, because my views about religion and politics have been most strongly influenced by 18th-century Enlightenment freethought, as exemplified by Thomas Paine. Paine was as opposed to slavery, the death penalty, and rule by inherited wealth as he was to orthodox religion. He was not opposed to government per se, as some conservatives have misleadingly suggested, but to government of the few, by the few, and for the few. In his 1794 essay Agrarian Justice, he became the first social thinker to propose a system of old age and disability pensions that relied not on charity but on government support provided by all citizens.

My atheism makes me a libertarian on government intrusion into essentially private matters--from sex between consenting adults to medical decisions about how to end one's own life--but I am not an anti-government economic libertarian at all. Which is to say that I think one of the entirely proper roles of government is to take away some of the money I make and use it to provide health care for people in need, to regulate financial institutions that cheat the public, to operate public schools, and to initiate numerous activities intended to reduce the gap between the rich and the poor. My government has the right to do this because I owe my living to one of the liberties guaranteed by my American citizenship--the opportunity to speak my mind and be paid for it. (Sarah Palin owes her living, on a much grander scale, to the same guarantee--but the freedom she loves so much is apparently the freedom to to keep every penny that she could earn only in America.)

There is another longstanding form of American secularist philosophy, descended not from Enlightenment freethought but from the 19th-century distortion of Darwin's theory of evolution known as social Darwinism. The modern descendants of the social Darwinists are cultural libertarians but economic conservatives, influenced in some instances, as their predecessors were, by pseudo-scientific convictions about racial intellectual superiority--which they attribute not to God but to nature itself. This strain of American secularism and atheism runs from the social Darwinists of the Gilded Age through the eugenicists of the early 20th century and the followers of Ayn Rand's so-called objectivism, to those within secular organizations today who insist on calling themselves skeptics, are offended by the depiction of secularists as humanists, and tend to be as opposed to government social programs as members of the religious right.

The essence of social Darwinism was its assertion (never made by Darwin) that the struggle of organisms for existence in nature was replicated by the struggle of humans within civilization. The poor were poor not because God had decreed it, as religious conservatives had claimed about slavery, but because they simply did not have the wits or the strength to be anything else. The inventor of social Darwinism (though he did not call it that) was the British philosopher Herbert Spencer, whose ideas received a much more favorable reception in Gilded Age America than in his native England. Spencer, not Darwin, coined the phrase "survival of the fittest" and applied it to human beings. (The best elucidation of social Darwinism's place in American intellectual history is still Richard Hofstadter's Social Darwinism in American Thought (1944).

Those who preached social Darwinism in the United States always claimed that their views were "scientific"--an adjective, when appended to what are essentially social philosophies, that is always a dead giveaway of their pseudo-scientific nature. Genuine science does not have to label itself scientific; pseudo-scientific thought does, in a vain effort to prevent being unmasked as mutton dressed as lamb. Thus, the adjective "scientific" often prefaced the decidedly unscientific, non-evidence based form of communism practiced in the Soviet Union. Plaudits to "scientific Communism" were supposed to prevent Russians from noticing that there was no food in the stores. In the United States, social Darwinists (some of whom, as free market disciples, now have a permanent address at right-wing think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute) have always claimed that any government reforms or regulations are attempts to interfere with the natural, scientifically based order of things.

William Graham Sumner, professor of political science at Yale from 1872 to 1910, was the prototypical secular, right-wing public intellectual. He explicitly compared Gilded Age tycoons to superior biological species that had emerged from eons of evolution and declared emphatically that men like J.P. Morgan and Henry Clay Frick were "a product of natural selection...just like the great statesmen, or scientific men, or military men." If all millionaires had emerged from fair competition, then they were best fitted to run society. (Sumner never addressed the question of whether the sons of tycoons were also superior by virtue of having been born to money.) Ayn Rand's turgid, didactic novels are nothing more than reheated Sumner.

Social Darwinism was always strongly linked with the eugencis movment, which had the same things to say about the intellectual inferiority of Jewish and Italian immigrants in the 1880s and 1890s that those who consider IQ tests scientifically unimpeachable have to say today about the intellectual inferiority of blacks. One would never know, from the comments of some atheists on this blog who seem convinced that IQ tests "prove" the intellectual superiority of whites, that many scientists argue that IQ tests measure only what people have learned within a given culture--not what their innate ability might be. Whatever supposedly scientific method has been used to measure intelligence--from 19th-century phrenology to today's psychological tests--the striking fact about generalizations regarding group intelligence is that they have always correlated with the group's economic status at a given historical moment. That is why many upper-class social Darwinists were convinced that East European Jewish immigrants were intellectually inferior at the turn of the century and would always remain so--and why we rarely hear such claims today.

The linkage between belief in the "scientifically proven" superiority of successful individuals and groups and opposition to government intervention in the economy is clear: If differences between the rich and the poor are really determined by natural evolution, and manifest themselves genetically, then government interference amounts to interference with nature. To me, this belief has a decidedly religious cast, and to find it, even in attenuated version, among atheists in the 21st century is befuddling. What could be more a matter of faith than the conviction that it is wrong for man to interfere with nature, whether through government or private effort? The average American life expectancy, around 40 at the turn of the century, has doubled--not primarily as a result of high-tech surgical procedures, drugs for the elderly, or even the common antibiotics introduced at mid-20th century but mainly as a result of improved sanitation and nutrition in the earliest decades of the century. Better sanitation--provided, let us not forget, by government--allowed many of those immigrants, then presumed to be genetically inferior, to live long into the century and send their children to high school and college. Had the children's genes magically improved?

It is impossible to determine the precise percentages in the split between political liberals and political conservatives among American atheists. We know that the religiously "unaffiliated," as the Pew Forum describes them, are more likely to be Democrats than Republicans. That is no surprise, given the strong identification between the Republican Party and the religious right. I suspect, however, that the there are many more descendants of social Darwinists among atheists than is generally recognized. This political divide definitely reduces the influence of atheists in the culture at large, because it means that the only thing the two branches of atheism have in common is opposition to government intrusion in private life and to clear-cut violations of the separation of church and state. What's likely to happen (in fact it already is happening) is that secular liberals will make common cause with religious liberals on economic and social issues as well as some church-state separation issues. This alliance can be uneasy, however, because many of the religious liberals, like Jim Wallis, who now exert strong influence within the Democratic Party favor what I consider grave violations of church-state separation--such as the massive funneling of tax money for charitable endeavors through religious organizations.
For anti-government atheists, third-party libertarian tickets are the only realistic political option--unless they can swallow their distaste for the Republicans' anti-gay rights, pro-religion platforms. If history is any guide (and I think it is, despite the noise being made by the tea partiers right now), the success of any third party will prove ephemeral and will negate the possibility of secularist influence on the right.

Many religious critics of atheism have chastised atheists for considering themselves intellectually superior to believers. I do consider atheism, as a way of looking at the world, intellectually superior to faith in the supernatural (a characteristic of every religion). But I certainly do not consider all atheists intellectually superior to all religious believers. There is no such thing as "scientific atheism." There are atheists who respect the difference between real science and pseudo-science and those who do not. There are atheists who wish to use reason to promote social progress (yet another filthy Enlightenment notion) and those who use bogus reasoning as a club to assert their own superiority. It is depressing to see the great tool of reason used for the latter purpose by those atheists who have fallen for some of the most persistent pseudo-scientific beliefs in American intellectual history.”

Most of the atheists I know are left-wing thinkers. As for myself, I’m a Libertarian: in theory. Libertarianism requires a lot of faith in humanity. Faith I’m not quite willing to give to it yet. It is an ideal that we are all motivated by self-interest and by doing so we will help others through charitable work. Unfortunately, the evidence that this would work in the real world appears to be lacking. In the past I did lean quite far to the left but as I became an atheist and my opposition to the control religion can have over society grew, I found it difficult to reconcile that view with the opinion that government should have a strong hand in people’s lives. Therefore, aspirations for a libertarian ideal aside, I’d certainly support an approach that balances individual freedoms with moderate government control. Punish those who attain wealth through devious means that bring harm to people or the environment and leave those who do so honestly be.

In Defense of Atheism

http://www.impactnottingham.com/2010/04/in-defence-of-atheism/
“In Defense of Atheism”:

“During a trial at The Old Bailey in February 2010, a man was given no jail sentence for deliberately breaking a stranger’s jaw in an unprovoked attack. He was let off with community service and a fine. The judge reasoned that the accused merited no harsher punishment because he was religious, and therefore unlikely to reoffend. The decision highlights the bizarre, yet persisting, assumption that religious faith is somehow an indication of good character - that there is something intrinsically and self evidentially good about being religious.

Society supposes to believe in the morality of religion due to its moral teachings and the charity done by religious groups. However, if you do think religious people are moral, you must ask yourself why they are moral. Is it plausible that their morality comes from the teachings of the holy books and from a belief in heaven and fiery hell? The holy books of the monotheisms were written when humans had no understanding of bacteria, tectonic activity or electricity; when they believed the earth was a disk, and the sky a dome. Is anyone seriously suggesting that without these we wouldn’t know right from wrong? If the Jewish ancestors were not at the foot of Mount Sinai would we not understand that it is wrong to murder? If God were proven not to exist would we all immediately embark on lives of theft, murder and cruelty?
Virtuous behaviour by a believer, or on behalf of a religious organisation is not proof of the moral steadfastness of religion. It is not even argument in its favour. People of religious charity did not originally lead self-centered and selfish lives until instructed by scripture to donate their money and free time to others. Such an argument goes nowhere in explaining the good actions done without supernatural consideration or inducement. With the claim that religion is inseparable from ethics and morality they are conceding that if it were not for faith, they would lead a lives of unbridled immorality. Is it ethical to be good only because you fear punishment? A person who led a good life only because they feared hell would go straight to hell.

Morality is part of human nature. It is also in the nature of a large number of animal species that don’t claim to be divinely inspired. If you see a child trying to run into a stream of traffic, something tells you what you ought to be doing about it. Equally, if you think of the worst thing you have ever done, the action of which you are least proud, and that you would least like to have widely known about, it undoubtedly pales in comparison to the actions of Dr Harold Shipman. Dr Shipman took great pleasure in murdering people who trusted him. Although you are ashamed of what you did, you think: “Yeah, but I’d never do that, I wouldn’t, and no one needs to tell me why I wouldn’t’.”

Morality is effortless, it’s innate, and doesn’t need to be taught to children. Even an 18-month year old child will try to comfort someone they see in distress. The argument is brilliantly summed up by Christopher Hitchens: “name me an ethical statement made, or an action taken by a believer that could not have been performed by a non believer. As yet I have heard of none. However, if you ask an audience to name a wicked action directly attributable to religious faith, nobody has any difficulty in finding an example”.

In spite of the current pessimistic view of the declining morality of society, the historical trend is of a positive improvement in society’s moral outlook. Today’s views on race, gender, equality, war, torture and sexual orientation are wildly different from the widespread views of society at the beginning of the 20th Century, and even from the views of the 1950s. Mainstream views on all these topics have only improved. The standard of morality in society improves decade on decade, and it is only based on our own ethical intuitions, and on conversation with the ethical intuitions of others. The moral standard has advanced so far that even the actions of Hitler, widely regarded today as pushing the envelope of evil into unchartered territory, would not have even been noteworthy in the time of Genghis Khan.

In accordance with this shifting morality, people of faith choose to reject the holy pearls of wisdom that encourage death by stoning for, among other things, adultery, premarital sex, atheism, belief in another God and homosexuality. These teachings are in the holy texts not as metaphors or analogies but as explicit instructions. The monotheistic texts celebrate war, murder, and genocide. Even good old Jesus was clearly a fan of slavery. Religious believers instead choose to emphasise the teachings similar to the golden rule - to behave to others as you wish them to behave towards you. The golden rule is not unique to any religion or society past or present, in fact, almost every society in the history of the world had a version of this rule in its cultural teachings.

A large number of believers go through the holy texts picking out the nasty verses from the nice verses; they choose the teachings that conform to current secular, moral standards. Religion gets its morality from society, not the other way around. The social standard to which religion conforms is available to everyone, and it advances in parallel in everyone. The places in which the moral standard has not advanced are typically the places in which religion looms large. Equally, the most successful, prosperous and democratic countries are those in which state and religion are separated by law (the only legal exception is the United Kingdom, however, the UK plainly functions as a secular republic).

A common riposte by the faithful is that the 20th Century was the most secular period in human history, and produced such monsters as Hitler and Stalin. If we’re on the subject of dictators, however, Mussolini, Franco and Salazar were installed and maintained by the Catholic right wing. Hitler was a Catholic, and the Catholic Church said prayers to celebrate Hitler’s birthday until as late as April 1945. Stalin was also able to exploit the apparatus of subservience adroitly created by the Russian Orthodox Church. In response to this argument, it is only necessary to highlight the decision of the Pope in 2005 to announce that condom use could worsen the problem of HIV and AIDS in Africa. It is difficult to imagine how the Pope could have caused more misery and human suffering with fewer words. Equally the advance of stem cell research is held back due to the religious theory of ‘souls’, a theory, which is shown to be spurious by a short spurt of the most basic scientific analysis. In any case, is the ‘soul’ of a cluster of cells more important than the life of a six-year-old child with cerebral palsy? The religious bludgeonings in the Middle East are almost too obvious to mention. It must be noted, however, that the actions committed there are not done “in the name of religion”, which is a common get-out clause of the faithful, but under the direct instruction of Imams and Rabbis. The easiest response to this claim of the deficiency of secular morality is that there are no atheist suicide bombers.

The idea that religion, ethics and morality are intrinsically linked is promulgated alongside the taboo of criticising religion. Throughout human history no one has been able to provide any type of evidence for a supernatural being, in fact only an abundance of evidence to the contrary. However, it remains that people’s faith cannot be questioned because ‘it’s their religion’. Although it is not understood where human morality comes from, it certainly does not come from religious texts. Richard Dawkins describes a convincing evolutionary theory in The God Delusion. Stephen Fry, however, concludes the argument most eloquently: “we should never allow religion the trick of claiming that the altruistic, the morally strong, and the virtuous are in any way inventions of religion, or particular or peculiar to religion”. An argument that claims morality stems from religion would be equally as convincing as an argument for an all loving, all powerful God who kills tens of thousands of people every year in natural disasters, who only chose to reveal himself after 100,000 years of human existence, whose only method of getting his son to earth was to impregnate a Palestinian virgin, and then to have all subsequent revelations in the same district.”

I’d say this is more of an offense against religion than a defense of atheism.