The Future of our Beautiful Christian Nation by Dane Andrade

reposted from: http://www.daneandrade.com/2007/09/04/31/

September 4th, 2007 by Dane Andrade

“We began with freedom.” -Ralph Waldo Emerson

Every day I read the latest articles railing and whining against the secular movements. Every day I read the same re-hashed arguments, the same tones, the same expressions of absolute faith and truth. I read that secularists are ruining America, I read that the Atheists are militant, dogmatic, and fundamentalists in their own right. I read that this country is a Christian nation, and be damned if you don’t agree.

Every article about atheism starts the same exact way:

“Atheism is getting a good press these days, but under false pretenses.”
“Fundamentalist Atheists are on the rise…”
“The only people more hard-headed than religious fundamentalists might just be
secularists.”
“A rash of atheist bestsellers…”
“Atheism has nearly always been with us in one form or another, but the atheists we’ve been hearing the most from lately—chiefly Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris—are a new breed.”
“A trio of atheist book sellers…”
“Militant atheists are on the march…”
“Although not yet organized into a marching army, we can identify a posse forming around malcontents such as Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Sam Harris.”
“Atheist tracts are everywhere these days…”

This is it? There is nothing more truthful so far in this battle then the simple fact that a good rebuttal has not been made. Period. Nothing. Theists have offered nothing except attempts to keep their flock intact by simplifying the positions to pre-19th century levels. Of course an atheist is wrong, no matter what he says, because God is real. The articles take on the same kind of rhetoric and senseless repetitive phrases that mid 20th century propagandists excelled.

The arguments that are formed with any coherency are usually detailed with the express assumption that one must first be delusional to understand it, one must first believe wholeheartedly, then whatever I say will make sense.

This kind of sensationalism scare tactic works, for now. Keeping the general public scared and thinking that atheism has been defeated since the dawn of time, with the words, let there be light.

Well my belligerent theist friends, you are wrong. Allow me to make some things very clear to you…

Let there be light indeed. We are here. We do not believe in your god, or any gods, and we must certainly do not believe this country is a Christian Nation. We don’t think it is an atheist nation either. We think it is a fair nation, a compromising and promising experiment in man made governance. There is no divine right, and there is no state religion. Every person is allowed to worship or not worship as he sees fit. I’m sorry this upsets you. I’m sorry that we have to come out of the woodwork to stop the encroaching insanity. I’m sorry the idea of us marching on Washington is enough to get you all up in arms, heaven forbid you can’t live and let live. No.

You aren’t happy until other parents children are learning the nonsense you think makes the world work. You aren’t happy until your version of right and wrong is imposed on the country. You aren’t happy until your neighbors have converted, their children attending Jesus Camp, and the morning classroom opens up with the some protestant declaration and statement of evangelical faith.

You aren’t happy until life is defined as cytoplasm, and a person’s dignity is shred from them as they lay dying, with their shit shoveled from their ass every morning in a vegetative state. You aren’t happy until other countries are subdued, converted, and speaking the name of Jesus, your man god. You aren’t happy unless every leader in the public sphere believes how you do. You aren’t happy unless your marriage is justified by blocking of marriages that don’t match your Christian formula.

You aren’t happy until science declares only that god exists, and that anything scholarly that denies it is wrong.

…and here my dearest Christian friends is the kicker. You still won’t be happy. As the tide of melting freedoms starts to pit denomination versus denomination, congregation versus congregation, church against church, some of you might actually rebel openly against the destruction of the wisdom of our sacred secularity.

As other countries start to grow stronger economically and technologically, your staunch Christian defined patriotism might not be enough to hold this country as a superpower for long.

What then? Slip back into the origins of what made this country so beautiful? Hardly. That isn’t how divine leadership works. Slowly but surely, every family will feel the pressure, the fall in the global pecking order, and the pressure to return to greatness will thrust us further into a theocracy.

“Why am I angry” you might ask… “why am I a “militant” atheist?”

I’ll tell you. It is Because I am fighting for your rights as well, and you hate me for it.

Humanists: stand up and be counted

June 18, 2007 10:35 AM - reposted from The Guardian

Atheists: stand up and be counted

Recently on these very pages, Theo Hobson called me pretentious and cowardly. It was not directed personally, but to all atheists, and particularly to those he describes as "militant".

One of those so-called "militants", AC Grayling, a BHA Vice President dealt quite adequately with Hobson's muddled and unnecessarily straw-clutching logic, and I need not add to Grayling's reply or the staggering 971 responses that the original comment generated.

But Hobson's rhetoric exemplifies a cultural position of mistrust towards atheism, that this default and rational position has negative connotations, associated with amorality and pessimism. This, of course, is nonsense. Wanting to live a life free of superstition is not cowardly, but increasingly brave under the government's burgeoning endorsement of faith. Realism is inherent in atheism, in contrast to the false promises of life eternal, and if morality simply follows a divine command, it is not moral at all.

Mercifully, although many of our politicians may be openly religious, Britain's political landscape is such that candidates do not have to be overtly religious to even stand a chance of election. There is even a cross-party Humanist Group. Compare that to the US, where in 2006 atheists were not represented in Congress at all. Perversely, the US has secularity protected by the constitution, whereas we Brits are subjects of the Defender of the Faith. But as Andrew Copson (BHA Education and Public Affairs) pointed out, the UK is moving at a menacingly creeping pace towards a government that is in thrall to religion.

The indoctrination that occurs at the ever-increasing faith schools can only promote the mistrust of atheists, and move us towards the deplorable situation in North America, where a 2006 survey revealed that atheists rank lower than "Muslims, recent immigrants, gays and lesbians and other minority groups in 'sharing their vision of American society'."

I recently gave a talk to science students at a secondary school about the risible promotion of intelligent design and creationism as an alternative to the theory of evolution in science lessons. One of my biggest worries before delivering this lecture was not the validity of my arguments, or whether I might offend any of the faithful, but is a bunch of 17-year-olds really going to give a shit?

I was pleased and relieved to find that they did. In conversation with some of them afterwards, they revealed that creationism was indeed a topic in science and religion classes, and the (admittedly self-selecting) audience was largely opposed not only to ID, but also all forms of Biblical literalism. I made a point of asking students what they think of Richard Dawkins, and to my horror, the vast majority had not heard of him.

Now, I support Richard Dawkins in his words and his manner, which while forthright, is also polite and thoughtful, as this video of him chatting to the Bishop of Oxford shows. It is a very rare occasion for me to disagree with anything he says. But it is shocking to think that in schools atheism's most vocal defender is unknown. I can only assume that Professor Grayling and Christopher Hitchens are similarly unheard of. While this debate bats back and forth in the pages of Comment is free and in the grand halls of the Royal Society, schoolchildren are being fed government-endorsed indoctrination into religion, and conversely are not exposed to the intellectual freedom that is inherent in atheism.

I call upon atheists everywhere to stand up and be counted. Take pride in being rational. I'm a humanist and a Darwinist, but not all atheists are. There is a positive message in atheism, which is that it is a position of intellectual curiosity, and our children should not be subjected to the bullying negativity of faith schools towards the atheist. I live a full and moral life. It is untroubled by fear or deference of supernature, and I am proud of that.

Militant & Evangelical Atheists

Vernon fails to identify that science is never 100% certain about anything - everything is provisionally true - until evidence comes along to provide a new provisional truth. Some things are very likely or more or less likely to be true but nothing is 100% certain.

Read Mark Vernon in The Guardian and the 100s of comments that follow:-

... I suspect that a similar process of conversion followed by disillusion is underway again today. Though this time it is not as a result of evangelical Christianity, but evangelical atheism. As AC Grayling has recently pointed out, there is no denying that the books of atheists like Richard Dawkins are being bought in their hundreds of thousands, much as individuals responded to Billy Graham in their hundreds of thousands. A simple message is on offer. This is the way life is. Live thus and be free.

... the rhetoric of the militant atheists is as bizarre and irrelevant as the evangelical call to confess.

... What is lost to their converts is the capacity to deal with something that lies at the heart of the human condition: uncertainty. The refusal of uncertainty, and the corresponding lust for certainty, is what evangelicals of both the religious and scientific sort trade on.

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