Dawn Sherman Is Fighting For Your Civil Rights

Yeah, like just because there don’t happen to be any gods, all us atheists have to be totally opposed to family fun like Easter egg hunts and Christmas presents, right? Because you nice Christians have, like, the patent on it? Like maybe the rest of us aren’t free to pick and choose what activities we want to do, just because you’d be offended?

Or maybe because, in the midst of all the body eating and blood drinking and genuflecting and picking up snakes and speaking in tongues and whipping yourselves bloody with flails and refusing your kids transfusions and asking favors of giant ghosts sitting on huge gold thrones in the sky, you think – ha-ha! – it doesn’t make SENSE?

More seriously, I’m guessing it didn’t occur to you that the choral singing was voluntary, something she herself CHOSE to do, but the moment of silence was a miniature religious ceremony imposed on her by government officials against her will (which was the core of her lawsuit)?

And where in the story did you get the idea that force was involved? You think you have to FORCE kids to not be Christians? Jeez, mister, I was on that path on my own before I was 13 years old. And this was in a hostile environment, rather than an accepting one such as this girl has.

I had a nice Christian stepfather who abused me for my choice for years afterwards ... and incidentally taught me that if you DO “have a chance to make up your own mind about god,” and then you make up your mind in the eminently reasonable way that all the evidence points to there being no such thing, and you decide not to accept it anymore, there were people who would torment you for it forever after, and some of them were called Christians. Judging from your comments, those people still exist.

And to THIS “ ... a reasonable solution would be for non believers to stand outside ...” let me just say this:

Cue drum roll and fanfare of trumpets, call in artists to illuminate the following on a football-fan-sized banner in gold leaf and brilliant colors ...

{{{{{{{{{{ ----- Screw you. ----- }}}}}}}}}}

Nonbelievers should STAND OUTSIDE??

... Yeah, and maybe we non-believers should have our own water fountains and restrooms too, so all the nice Christians aren’t contaminated by our dirty, unacceptable presence.

She seems to want to pick and choose the nice things out of Christianity (like singing in a choir) and then to reject the things she doesn't like (the moment of silence).

You're *so* right, dags! We atheists should completely disavow anything done in the name of religion in the last, what, 10,000 years?

*Sigh*

We cannot escape the fact that all we have, all we are, has been built upon what has come before. Sir Isaac Newton summed it up nicely: "If I have seen farther than others it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants."

My country, at least in part, owes its economic development to slavery. Just because we now benefit from that heritage does not mean that we must also continue the practice of slavery in a mindless effort at 'consistency'. No. We have left that cultural artifact behind us. Just as, for some of us, we have left behind religion, while nonetheless acknowledging what was done for the advancement of humankind in the name of religion (since that was the 'only game in town' for centuries).

See, it's really not so hard once you stop to think about it just a little bit.

Jim Downey

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Like Science Fiction? Read my novel, Communion of Dreams, for free.

You have it turned around in your head just a bit.

It's not about the majority being "ruled" by the minority. It's a matter of protecting the minority from the majority ... making a social space in which minorities of all sorts can survive and retain full rights as citizens amid the political force which democracy allows the majority to wield.

Fascism? Bullshit. Probably anyone can think of countless examples of minority rights that can be abridged by majority desires. Majority whites might decide minority Hispanics should work for below minimum wage. Majority Christians, say Catholics (in South America, perhaps), might decide minority Christians, Protestants, should have no right to protest the takeover of their businesses and property.

One good example played out here recently, where the Supreme Court incorrectly ruled that private property could be taken by eminent domain to be used by private developers. So if some big development company could convince the city council that your family farm would better serve the city with taxes by becoming a tract of condos, bye-bye family farm, bye-bye individual property rights.

The idea is to prevent a democratic society from becoming a mob by creating a slate of rights that are the same for everybody. At the base, this is about bullying, protecting the weak from the strong. Without that, you don't have society, you have victims and victimizers.

This little girl is saying "I don't want to be a victim." This is the pretty much the reverse of fascism. I wish I'd had the guts, or the parental support, to fight establishment bullies like this when I was 14.

And really, does anyone think this "moment of silence" is anything other than a bullshit way to get the camel's nose of Christianity into the school tent? The comments to the story are exquisitely revealing that for a large number of readers, getting and keeping Christianity in schools is EXACTLY what this is all about.

And those comments ... whew. I have to remind myself that the people using a computer to read the story and leave comments are probably the fairly smart ones.

Why of course, the big fat christian takes almost all the sofa and whines when the little atheist tries to get a little more comfortable.

And have you seen the tone of some comments ?
Basically : "Wow, she thinks she's so important, making everything about herself"
It's like, do these guys actually think ?