The Bad Faith Award is given out by New Humanist magazine and it goes to “the person who has made the year’s most outstanding contribution to talking unadulterated (and often destructive) nonsense about matters of religion.”
We’ve all heard stories about how some Christians pharmacists cite “conscience clauses” to withhold birth control or morning-after pills from women because those things go against their faith. (Of course, they should be fired for not doing their job.)
But this notion of religious fundamentalists thinking the rules don’t apply to them stretches beyond the pharmacy.
Pam McLaurin, an evangelical Christian and kindergarten teacher in Texas, refuses to give police her fingerprints for a background check and she’s suing over it.
Her lawsuit cites the Bible — which, in her mind, says that fingerprints are the Mark of the Beast.
Her attorney, Scott Skelton, said his client believes that the computerized fingerprinting, in which her fingerprints will be stored in a database, is the mark addressed in Revelation. The teacher does not believe that it is merely coincidence that Revelation says only those with the ‘mark on his forehead or on his hand’ will be able to buy or sell, since only those teachers who comply with fingerprinting requirements will keep their jobs, he said.
“This law prohibits the free exercise of her religion,” Skelton said in a telephone interview.
Before anyone comments that someone with her mentality shouldn’t be allowed near children, I should mention there’s no evidence that she teaches Creationism or preaches hellfire or anything like that to the children. So I’ll avoid that characterization.
As for her sanity? That’s up for debate.
Regardless, this is still a problem.
If she gets her way, what’s to stop criminals who don’t want to be fingerprinted from using the same argument? Couldn’t they refuse to give a DNA sample for religious reasons as well?
It’s a slippery slope we’d be heading down if this lawsuit gained any traction.
(While we’re at it, how could the Mark of the Beast come from fingerprints that she surely believes God created? Oh, never mind… there’s no use trying to parse the logic in her argument when there is none to begin with.)
In the complaint, the passenger told MARTA officials the bus was traveling northbound when it stopped at the corner of Northlake Parkway and Lavista Road.
As the passenger, whose name was not released, approached the front of the bus, Matthews stood from his seat and asked everyone to hold hands for a brief word of prayer.
Maybe Matthews and Angela Shiel should form some sort of Christian bus driver union…
It’ll be tough for Matthews to spin his way out of this one and who knows if he’ll learn his lesson in the five days during which he’s suspended. It’s bad enough that he’s wasting his own time by praying, but he has no right to waste the time of others or, even worse, not give them the option of getting off the bus.
There are plenty of Bible-related iPhone applications out there, but this one is slightly different.
Shake up your phone and a new Bible verse appears.
An amusing, possibly-graphic, potentially-obscene, and/or violent Bible verse.
Good times.
The designer of the app, Francis Dierick, took this project personally. In an email, he writes:
Selecting those quotes was actually a very interesting personal experience that renewed my atheist ardour. The app was developed with tongue firmly planted in cheek: e.g. it has a 17+ rating to protect the children from the obscenities described in the bible.
The app costs $0.99, but Francis has been nice enough to offer free promo codes for a few readers.
If you want them, all you have to do is leave a comment with the most mis-interpret-able Bible verse you can find
If you use your real email address, I’ll pick my favorite three and those people will get an email from me with their promo code tomorrow. (To use them, go to the iTunes store and click on “Redeem.”)
It looks like your money will continue to have “In God We Trust” written on it.
The lawsuit filed by atheist Carlos Kidd against President Obama and the Chairman of the Federal Reserve to remove the motto from the currency was dismissed by a judge earlier this week.
The brief ruling by the judge said that there was no Establishment Clause conflict based on previous church/state separation cases.
I’m no lawyer… but how is that phrase not an endorsement of religion over non-religion? (Not only that, you know the phrase refers to the Christian god…)
It’s not the most pressing issue atheists have to worry about — we still have to fight against faith-based initiatives, for one — and I would think it virtually impossible to get the phrase off our currency anytime soon, but this is a lawsuit I don’t mind seeing.
Some could argue that it’s yet another case that will set a precedent for the future — a lawsuit that will hurt our future efforts in this area.
Still, I see an upside. Lawsuits like this can get blasted by the media and bloggers. But it raises the question of why that phrase is on the currency in the first place. People start to read up on why the phrase was adopted by our country as its motto — in response to those “Godless Communists” — and why it was originally put on our coins in the 1860s.
Why was it, you ask? Here’s a piece of the letter from Rev. M. R. Watkinson, Minister of the Gospel from Ridleyville, Pennsylvania to Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase which urged the Secretary to put holy words on the coins:
Dear Sir: You are about to submit your annual report to the Congress respecting the affairs of the national finances.
One fact touching our currency has hitherto been seriously overlooked. I mean the recognition of the Almighty God in some form on our coins.
…
This would make a beautiful coin, to which no possible citizen could object. This would relieve us from the ignominy of heathenism. This would place us openly under the Divine protection we have personally claimed. From my hearth I have felt our national shame in disowning God as not the least of our present national disasters.
A couple years later, “In God We Trust” was adopted. It went away for a little while, but it’s been there since the 1950s.
How is that phrase not Christian? How is it not a violation of church/state separation? How is it not a violation of the Establishment Clause?
The judge was wrong, plain and simple.
And, yes, so were all those other judges before him.
This week the theme is Bait and Switch and of course they thought about Christians.
So they found Off The Map because we are in the business of helping Christians learn how to not be jerks which means we hear a lot of jerky stories (some of which are bait and switch).
So last weekend I found myself sitting in the studios of KUOW / NPR Seattle (94.9 FM), headphones firmly situated, with Ira Glass in the middle of my head talking with me. The conversation continued for an hour and fifteen minutes…
I suppose Jim still technically owns my soul… which means I can safely say I have now met Ira Glass.
… All of this is informed by my worldview as a communist. At the same time, because this communist worldview is rooted in confronting the world as it actually is and as it actually can be, there is tremendous room for others, coming from their own worldviews but similarly committed to the betterment of humanity, to be enriched through an engagement with these views on morality.
From all this, it is clear that the EHSC knew I was a communist from the very beginning. But, as the date of my long-scheduled talk approached, some began a drive to cancel my talk exactly because of these views…
Second, we have a statement from a woman (Sue B.) who coordinated Sunsara’s tour and worked closely with the EHSC over the past few weeks:
… I believe that part of the reason EHSC is persisting in deliberately misrepresenting what happened and spinning a story that fortifies an untruthful account is because they don’t want to confront the reality of how ugly this whole thing has been, how much it goes against their own principles…
Finally, there’s a statement from lawyer Martha Conrad, who was present at the event:
… I was present at the Ethical Humanist Society of Chicago [EHSC] on November 1st. I personally witnessed the entire incident leading to the arrest and can lay out the salient facts of what occurred at EHSC that day.
That morning, I entered the building behind Ms. Taylor and others about ten minutes before the 10:30 am program was to start. No one at any time told Ms. Taylor, the videographer or anyone else that they could not enter the event, which was advertised as being “free and open to the public.”…
I’m not sure if there’s any resolution to be had between Sunsara and EHSC. But at least both sides have had a chance to explain themselves in a public setting.
I just started my day with a dose of outrage. The notion of hell exists in many religions and denominations. If a person believed it to be torture and that his friends or family members would suffer eternally unless they converted, it makes sense for them to evangelize.
What a powerfully successful meme. What a sick, twisted, and fucked up belief system.
I almost blew a blood vessel watching the following bullshit. It’s a hypothetical letter from hell written by a teenager to his Christian friend describing the terrible agony and asking why he didn’t evangelize.
I refuse to watch it again to type up a transcript of any kind.
I used to think that John Stuart Mill was right that when ideas were freely exchanged the marketplace of ideas would eventually expose the truth and that people would come to know it for the truth. But then I started learning more about the flaws and weaknesses in human reasoning and perception. We’re extremely vulnerable to this kind of emotional manipulation, and it threatens to overwhelm our rational faculties. Being true is different from being convincing. I no longer trust that the truth will win out.
Talk about intellectual cowardice. This entire argument is a blatant appeal to emotion which should be dispelled by stopping to think for 10 seconds. But when you’re irrationally terrified, it’s hard to form rational thoughts. Too often, religion uses bad logical arguments slipped in the ‘emotional’ side door to our beliefs.
These are the memes we are up against. People believe it because they themselves have been affected by the meme. I give them credit for genuinely believing in the horror of hell and for – understandably – wanting their friends and family to avoid it.
We are not up against the people who believe; we are up against the memes that have infected society and are spreading irrational fear. It’ll be a tough struggle – we can’t overcome the inherent flaws in our evolved brains. But I for one think it’s a struggle worth having.
This is something that i’ve been wracking my brain about lately. I live in Lynchburg, Virginia (yes, THAT Lynchburg) and there’s this one house on this one street that happens to be on my route to work. This guy has his own personal little church sign board you can put lettering on, and boy does he wear his beliefs on his sleeve.
For the longest time most of his messages and statements have been pretty benign. Standard stuff like “Jesus is life” and “It takes more faith to be an Athiest than a christian” (he can’t spell either).
However, over the past 6 months or so, the sign has gotten highly offensive. For example, he currently has “TURN OR BURN” on his sign. Other previously offensive things I’ve seen on that board are “EVOLUTION: A LIE TAUGHT TO CHILDREN” and “EVERYONE HAS A MASTER.” I’m just glad I work a later shift now and don’t have to stare at the other side of that thing anymore. Being that this is a sign owned by a private individual, is there anything I can do? I’m sure hundreds if not thousands of people come down that road every day and are exposed to the misinformation and hate this guy spews through that sign.
Can anything be done about this sign? I’ve tried scouring through laws for my state on google, but keep coming up empty handed. Please help!
J
Dear J,
I think you know what the answer is. Live with it, and every time you see that sign, rejoice gratefully that you live in the land of the free. The sign is apparently private property on private property. Unless it is violating local signage codes or zone regulations, there is nothing you can do about it and nothing that you should do about it.
Either we all have freedom of speech or none of us have. Any law that could shut him up could and would be used to shut you up as well. Many people have given their lives for both of you to be free to speak your minds, and I’m afraid that to protect our freedom, many more may have to give their lives yet. There will always be those among us who would forcibly remake everyone in their own image, if they could. Resist the seductive temptation to be one of them.
We need to raise our threshold for feeling offended. It seems to have become very low in our society lately. Increasingly, more people are decrying as “offensive,” smaller and smaller things that contradict their views. If this thin-skinned trend continues, since no one can see anything exactly as anyone else does, then eventually everyone will be offended by everyone else on every possible subject. We will be omni-offended.
I know it can be annoying to see some dimwit displaying his disapproval of his wide variety of scapegoats. Annoyance is inside us, not around us. It is our reaction, our emotion, our creation. If we allow too much of it to occupy our minds, it drains us of our strength, and it foments discouragement. We will never get rid of all the annoying things, but we can change how we respond to those things.
Carl Jung once said, “Everything that annoys us about others can help us to understand ourselves.” Disagree intellectually with the sign man’s opinions all you want. But you can follow your annoyance into your mind to find where you feel insecure, or have hurt, or have your own anger or resentment, and then by facing and resolving those things, you can become more serene. Imagine. Using that sign to become more serene?! Richard, you’re crazy. Yes I am. Thank you.
A sense of humor can help as well. Think of the phrase “sense of humor” literally. Not creating something that is funny, but sensing the humor that is already there in the situation. It’s there if you can but sense it. Sensing the humor in a situation brings you a measure of mastery of that situation. You can begin to rise above it.
Think of the sign as a public service announcement. If the guy wants to publicly announce that a superstitious, intolerant ignoramus who is getting steadily worse lives in this house, then thanks for the warning! If anyone has an emergency on that road, they’ll know better and go to the next house for assistance.
I’d be looking forward to my daily dose of dementia from the local kook. There’s a chuckle in it if you can first create peace within yourself.
Richard
You may send your questions for Richard to . All questions will eventually be answered, but not all can be published. There is a large number of requests; please be patient.
In short, as I reported it, Sunsara was invited to speak to the group on the topic of “Morality Without Gods,” then later uninvited when her other political/social views became known (and it was understoof that some of those views would work their way into her talk). Sunsara got quite a bit of support from individuals (including me) who found it ironic and “unethical” that a speaker at an ethical society would be uninvited for holding views such as Communism.
Sunsara staged a protest the morning she was supposed to speak, inviting EHSC members to hear her talk at another member’s house. A videographer was on hand to capture this… as were a couple cops, who arrested the man with the camera. It wasn’t pretty.
Members of the EHSC board feel they’ve gotten a bad rap from this and much of it is due to misinformation being spread.
They wanted a chance to clear this up and sent me the following email. With their permission, I’m posting it here:
Dear Mr. Mehta,
We don’t know if you know all of what has happened since your letter of support for Ms. Taylor but we wanted to give you the history of all that has transpired. All of the signees of this letter contributed their shared experience to this account.
Our Sunday speakers are chosen by a committee of nine people. In July, at one of the committee member’s nominations, Ms. Taylor was provisionally invited to speak on a topic of “Morality Without Gods” on November 1. The official confirmation letter was withheld until the committee was provided with a written description of her talk.
The written description was finally received on October 13. Some of the committee felt that the description provided was far outside the topic that was originally proposed. Ms. Taylor was contacted about adjusting her talk to fit what the committee originally thought they were getting. She understandably refused to adjust her talk. The committee decided by a vote of 7 to 2 to cancel Ms. Taylor as a speaker and the cancellation, with apologies, was emailed on October 19.
We are democratically run organization and the vote isn’t always unanimous; some members were disappointed. A petition was started to let the invitation stand of which only about 20% of the members supported. In the end we stuck with our democratic principles.
From October 19 onward Ms. Taylor and her people demanded she be given the November 1 platform. Attempt after attempt was made to find a solution that, although not ideal for either side, was palatable for both. The society bent over backwards to appease Ms. Taylor. She was given an October 31 workshop that was well attended and a member of the society offered her home for Ms. Taylor’s self proclaimed “speech in exile” on November 1. Notice of the “exile” speech was even made through the Society’s list serve. The only thing we would not agree to was having her speak at the society on November 1. All we asked is that she not disrupt the Sunday platform. She did not budge an inch; there was no effort at compromise from her or her people.
One plain clothes police officer from the Skokie police department was at the society the morning of November 1 because some members felt threatened by the fact that Ms. Taylor would not commit to not disrupting the Sunday program. We had no idea what a Sunsara Taylor inspired protest would entail so the decision was made to err on the side of member safety.
When Ms. Taylor, her cameraman and 20 plus followers showed up on Sunday they were asked not to enter the building, they ignored this request but no action was taken by the society and they entered private property.
After entering the building and our auditorium, Ms. Taylor started to give her speech and her camera man started taping. They were asked to stop and let us continue our event in our building repeatedly. They refused and it is then that we asked the single plain clothes officer for support.
When the cameraman acted aggressively toward the police officer he called for backup on his radio. Uniformed officers responded to that call. This man continued to resist police attempts to get him out of the building. It finally took five police officers using mace to subdue him. One police officer was injured.
What you do with this information is of course entirely up to you, but we thought you should be aware.
Respectfully,
Matt Cole – President
John Ungashick – Board Member
Lisa Crowe – Board Member
Sue Walton – Board Member
Laura Drower – High School Youth Advisor
Sharon Appelquist – Sunday School Director
Joe Burck – Program Committe
Susan Burck – Program Committe
Evan Kane – Member
Katie Merrell – Member
Ed Drower – Member
Tom Hoeppner – Member
Not that they needed to, but they also sent me copies of their email correspondence, which confirms the statements in their letter.
I extended an invitation to Sunsara to see if she’d like to respond in kind. I haven’t heard back yet, but if she would like to issue a public response, this forum is available to her.
Secular Student Alliance Member Todd Stiefel has agreed to match all donations to us by 12/21/2009 up to a total of $50,000. Double the value of your support and help us get the whole match by donating now.
