This is why atheists are resentful

There are still bans on atheists serving in government in seven states. The U.S. Supreme Court declared such bans to be unconstitutional in 1961. Secularists are looking to remove the language from the states' constitutions.

Not everyone is on board with the effort.

Christopher B. Shank, the Republican minority whip in the Maryland Senate, said that while he believed in pluralism, “I think what they want is an affirmation that the people of the state of Maryland don’t care about the Christian faith, and that is a little offensive.”

There is an enormous blind spot in many people's minds that allows them to equate secularism with hostility to Christianity. Shank has that blind spot in spades. Moreover, he misses the point that the government of Maryland cannot speak for the people of Maryland on the question of whether those people "care about the Christian faith". Do you understand the First Amendment, Mr. Shank? You don't sound like you do.

Removing the patently unConstitutional language from the offending states' constitutions would say nothing about people's attitude toward Christianity (or any other faith, not that Shank appears to have thought about that, either). It would say that faith and government shouldn't be entangled. That's no more — and no less — than we should all expect.

Like the fatuous resistance to removing the ill-considered phrase "under God" from the Pledge of Allegiance, the resistance to cleaning up the unenforceable and discriminatory language from state constitutions is rooted in nothing more than reflexive and thoughtless prejudice against atheists (and secularists generally).

It's disgraceful that the ridiculously easy and necessary cleanup remains undone after more than half a century.

Enough inexcusable excuses. Enough stalling. In fact, just plain enough. Enough.

Hostility toward believers

I was going to comment on New York Times columnist David Brooks' column of a couple of days ago in the Times' own comments area but was unable to do so due to an odd technical glitch. Here's what I would have written.

Kudos to David Brooks for once again pleading victimhood for those poor oppressed religious believers out there.

Brooks spends his entire column talking about how "[t]here is a yawning gap between the way many believers experience faith and the way that faith is presented to the world" and trying to explain what faith means to believers. All well and good, but the point he made at the very start of his column — as the very first sentence, in fact — was:

There is a strong vein of hostility against orthodox religious believers in America today, especially among the young.

Yet nowhere does he address what is almost certainly the primary reason for that alleged hostility (for which he doesn't provide a citation, by the way, though I believe he's correct that it exists).

Religion simply isn't that big a deal until it's linked to politics. Or, more accurately, until religion starts throwing its weight around in politics.

Now, you can argue that religion and politics have been linked for ... well, forever, really. The very idea of "separation of church and state" didn't exist until the seventeenth century in Europe. Even today, many nations are implicitly associated with a particular faith simply because it never occurs to most of their inhabitants that things could be otherwise.

Yet it's one thing for religion to be so much a part of the fabric of life that it's as ubiquitous and invisible as air. It's another for religion to stake out a place in a nation's polity. When that happens, strife is guaranteed — because it's already present.

When a particular faith is ubiquitous, its adherents and leaders never need to announce their presence in politics: the faith is already there in every decision. A faith only announces political positions because it senses those positions aren't universally shared and therefore certain to be reflected in state policy. If that's true, the nation is divided on religious lines.

The moment one religious group takes a political position, other groups are likely to take one, too. And since we're talking about religious faith, the source of many people's deepest beliefs, we're automatically talking about a contentious issue, no matter what it is.

Orthodox religious believers hew to a particularly stringent view of their faith, and are likely to be among the most passionate in defending and advancing it. When defending and advancing their faith affects governmental policy, is it any surprise that it provokes a strong opposing response from those who don't share that faith?

And if, as has been true for at least thirty years in the U.S., those "orthodox religious believers" have experienced much success in elevating elements of their belief system to the level of law, is it any surprise that those who don't share those beliefs feel hostile?

Brooks conveniently also leaves out the flip side of his argument, the incredible hostility by many believers to non-believers. Hostility to other faiths is one thing; hostility to lack of belief is a far more virulent problem, as this Atlantic piece from last September shows. Heck, such hostility is the only thing that unites many believers of different faiths.

By leaving out politics and focusing only on the putatively beleaguered and misunderstood people of faith, Brooks implies that it's the rest of us who are the problem. That's nonsense.

... Oh, why am I pussyfooting around; this is my blog. Scratch "nonsense".

That's horseshit.

Response to Nicholas Kristof on the Catholic Church

In his 1 May 2010 column discussing the Catholic Church, Nicholas Kristof wrote:

Yet the church leaders are right about one thing: there is often a liberal and secular snobbishness toward the church as a whole — and that is unfair.

It may be easy at a New York cocktail party to sniff derisively at a church whose apex is male chauvinist, homophobic and so out of touch that it bars the use of condoms even to curb AIDS.

It's easy to caricature the Church in these terms. It's even easier to caricature secular criticism of the Church as "snobbishness." Both reek of straw, as in straw-man arguing.

The nuns and priests Kristof singled out in this column are supposed to illustrate why such snobbishness is misplaced. "Snobbishness," my ass. Whose delicate pinky is raised just so in the air as he pontificates (if you'll excuse the Catholic pun) on the silliness of the Church? In this country, most people take religion seriously, whether they subscribe to a particular belief or not.

In the United States, at this moment in time, it's far more likely that leaders of intolerant religious organizations will denounce, not sniff derisively at, those who have rejected organized religion altogether, than that someone will make a public statement disdaining an established religion. For instance, accusing secularists of eroding the moral foundation of society is good red meat to throw at fundraising time. It's also almost as insulting as the claim would be that the Catholic Church is responsible for all the child abuse in society. Yet the secularism-is-evil trope is acceptable in polite company, whereas the other claim is never heard not only because it's absurd, but because most people would find it repugnant.

The Catholic Church isn't the victim (of snobbishness or anything else) here.

(By the way: as Kristof noted, the Vatican's criticism of some news outlets for supposed overzealousness in uncovering the extent of child abuse in the Church's ranks is misplaced, to put it kindly. If any other organization had been accused of such activities, not only would there have been the same widespread news coverage, not only would there have been the same condemnation, but there probably would have been calls for mass arrests of the organization's top officials for malfeasance or gross negligence. In fact, by comparison to other organizations like public corporations, there is even greater reason to call high Church officials to account for this scandal. The Catholic Church exhorts its followers -- as well as non-believers -- in the most passionate terms to observe a set of moral norms. One could consider that exhortation its primary duty -- yet its officials failed to observe those norms! Not only did the abusers themselves violate them, but also, and even worse, mid-level Church officials routinely violated those norms as well, by hiding the abuse from the public.)