Paul Fidalgo's blog

The Concord Monitor comes out against Rick Warren at Barack Obama's inauguration. . .but not only does the Monitor oppose Warren because of his anti-gay views, the paper (once named by Time Magazine as one of America's best newspapers) comes to the conclusion that inaugural prayers ought to be done away with entirely:

Do we need an inaugural prayer? Somehow, in a country that has become more and more diverse, a country that includes not only Protestants, but also Catholics, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists and nonbelievers, the tradition seems an anachronism that future presidents would do well to scrap.

Formal prayers by Christian ministers have been associated with presidential inaugurations from the get-go, but they're surely no requirement. And while you might assume such prayers would be of the tepid, generic, non-denominational variety, a quick look back at recent overtly religious invocations will surely give many Americans, regardless of their personal religious affiliations, pause.

This morning brings with it two examples of really bad arguments against Michael Newdow's suit to un-God-ify the presidential inauguration. I'll deal with the weaker of the two first, by Dan McDowell who writes a Boston College Democrats column for Examiner.com. I consider it weaker because the piece is peppered with such phrases as "come on" and "what is this?", which I suppose are meant to be informal and familiar, but really only make the author seem, well, twelve.

McDowell doesn't seem to really know where he stands on the issue, as he insists:

I am a strong supporter of the separation of church and state. It is to the benefit of both that the institutions do not get mixed up with one another.

And then tells us (emphasis mine):

Going after the word God appearing anywhere in the public sphere, including our government, is ridiculous.

Ed Halliwell on the Guardian's blog makes what I can only assume is an attempt at a kind of charming, I'm-okay-you're-okay détente between believers and atheists in an otherwise benign post about the Buddha's unwillingness to delve into the question of the existence of a supreme being.

I suppose that's all well and good, but in his admiration for the Buddha's disinterest, he woefully mischaracterizes the atheist position:

Part of what makes the argument [over God's existence] so comical is how the concept of "God" onto which atheists project is rarely the same as the one defended by believers.

Whatever images of God some atheists might like to invoke in heated antitheistic rhetoric, the God whose existence is denied is not limited to one or another caricature, but all gods, all supernatural beings, all unknowable, mystical, cosmic consciousnesses. So not only is the concept of God that is refuted the same as the one defended by believers, but every concept of God (that is not merely a shorthand metaphor for what actually is).

I opted not to deal with Andrew Brown's recent incoherent diatribe against the New Atheists on the Guardian's website, mainly for its messy impenetrability and my own sense that life is just too short.

Today, though, Brown posts again to respond to criticisms of the first posting, particularly the charge that he intentionally leaves out the philosophers of the bunch, namely Daniel Dennett (whom he admits he loathes and therefore can't write about objectively) and Sam Harris.

The crime? See for yourself:

Bloc Raisonneur reader StanB directed my attention to two pieces from the Ottawa Citizen that I think are very important. One is a full-length article, another a short response.

The main article is by Robert Sibley who inspired another post by me only a couple of days ago. I did not realize the degree of revulsion Sibley feels for the New Atheists and atheism in general, but his December 26 essay is brimming with resentment that reveals itself in absurd acts of psychological speculation and rhetorical foul play. What follows are just a few examples. First, my jaw dropped when I read this (my own emphasis added):

Modern philosophy, natural science and psychology are, more often than not, atheistic in outlook. So, too, are many of our social and political institutions. It is a virtual taboo for a Canadian politician to refer to his or her religious faith in public life. The school system teaches students about sex and drugs, but classroom prayers have largely been cancelled.

[continued after the flip...]

A couple of weeks ago, the Pew Forum showed off its latest numbers concerning what Christians are saying about what it takes to get into heaven. I was surprised by one of the statistics: 42 percent of Christians said that atheists could find their way past the pearly gates if they lead a good life.

Now, I know a lot of open-minded Christians who really do believe that Heaven or the afterlife takes all kinds--the old "there are many paths to God" idea. But I have also known some, even very good friends, who despite their affection for me, have told me that my soul is as good as barbecued lest I straighten up and hang with the J.C. Being that the "many paths" philosophy is quite a progressive one, I assumed that a vast majority of Christian Americans fell in the "barbecue" category. Not so, apparently! 42 percent is not a majority, of course, but it's damned closer than I thought atheists could get in the minds of our Christian neighbors.

(And, of course, the number 42 has its own significance, especially to atheists.)

So what's going on here?

Law professor Paul Campos op-eds in the Rocky Mountain News on the subject of the very real dilemma for progressive atheists: reconciling support for Barack Obama's politics with his overt religiousness.

Campos has apparently come across some folks bandying about the possible insincerity of Obama's religious professions, and it seems to be bothering Campos:

Since it's obviously absurd to claim that people like Obama lack the necessary intelligence to grasp these truths that are so self-evident to the fundamentalist atheist, our fundamentalist friend is left with a couple of options.

First, he can claim that the otherwise intelligent person has been, as it were, brainwashed by his upbringing, his education, his psychological quirks (this latter explanation is especially popular among those who see religious belief as a form of unconscious wish-fulfillment) or some other ideological factor that remains impervious to what fundamentalist atheists likes to call "reason."

[. . .]

The alternative is to assume that obviously intelligent people who profess religious belief are lying. This belief is reflected in the assertion, repeated several times in the responses to my blog post, that surveys showing atheists to be a small minority of the population are inaccurate, because lots of people who are "really" atheists - like, apparently, Barack Obama - lie about it.

The LA Times totally misses the point of the Freedom from Religion Foundation's attempt to stop Colorado governor Bill Ritter's proclamation of a day of prayer. The editorial asserts that the controversy centers, in part, around whether the specific prayer to be given would amount to an endorsement of a specific religion or of some right-wing policy supported by the "hysterical" (their word) James Dobson's Focus on the Family.

But the verse in question is not the problem. The problem (obviously, or so one would think) is that the very act of a prayer assumes the existence of--and gives acquiescence to--an omnipotent super-being. That may not be an official endorsement of a religion, but it is most certainly a tacit endorsement of religion itself.

The Pew Forum reports on the religious affiliations of Members of Congress. Not surprisingly, there are some curious inequities in representation.

First some background. Atheists are indeed a tiny minority in the United States: Pew's national survey shows atheists make up 1.6% of the population, though secularists generally tend to prefer citing the 16.1% of Americans who are of no religion or unaffiliated.

For a little perspective on that 1.6 number, compare that to the national percentage of Jews (1.7%) and Mormons (also 1.7%). Doesn't look as tiny as it once did, does it?

Now let's look at Congress. According to Pew, Jews make up 8.4% of the legislative branch (almost 5 times the percentage of Jews in the general population), and Mormons make up 2.4% (twice the percentage of the general population).

A headline from the Las Vegas Sun caught my attention:

I will be really glad when the hubbub over the atheist placard in Washington State is over with, but it does keep generating insight on the state of atheists in the culture--but not just in terms of how they are perceived, but in how they are portraying themselves.

Take, for example, Dan Barker, head honcho at the Freedom from Religion Foundation, an important group that is responsible for the placard which states, in part, "Religion is but myth and superstition that hardens hearts and enslaves minds." (Emphasis mine.)

[Barker] said if anything, it's the Nativity scene that is the intrusion.

"Most people think December is for Christians and view our signs as an intrusion, when actually it's the other way around," he said. "People have been celebrating the winter solstice long before Christmas. We see Christianity as the intruder, trying to steal the holiday from all of us humans."

In case you hadn’t heard, thanks to protesting e-mails and phone calls from the sane, the Cincinnati Zoo ended a cross-promotional deal with the Creation Museum of Petersburg, Ky. P.Z. Myers is getting a great deal of the credit/blame for encouraging his readers to make a stink. Well done, say I.

But I must also say, as happy as I am that this nonsense was dispensed with, I remain flabbergasted that the Cincinnati Zoo would enter into a deal like this in the first place.

I continue to be amazed at how hurt many religious people claim to be by the atheist plaque at the Washington State Capitol Building. I have written on my own blog about the false equation often made of criticism of a person’s choice of religion versus denigration of a person for accidents of their birth (race, gender, sexual orientation, etc.). I posit that criticizing a particular religion (or religion in general) is akin to criticizing someone for being a Democrat or a Keynesian: it is a reaction to someone’s philosophical or ideological choice, the tenets of which are open to debate. It is not the same as hating someone simply because they are black or gay or Romanian or what have you.

Chuck Norris (for whom I think a whole separate post is required to lament the loss of a folk hero to wingnutsville), for example, has “written” an “article” for the “news site” WorldNetDaily in which he laments: