Religious Right Watch

Rising atheism in America puts 'religious right on the defensive'

Professor Barry Kosmin of Trinity College, who conducts the national Religious Identification Survey, believes up to a quarter of young people in the US now have no specific faith, and scoffs at the idea, prevalent in so much US media and culture, that the country is highly religious or becoming more so. "The trending in American history is towards secularisation," Kosmin said.

He cites the example of the changing face of Sunday in the country. It was not too long ago when many sporting events were banned on Sundays and most shops were closed too. Now the opposite is largely true.

As in Britain, Sunday in the US has become a normal shopping day for many, or a day to watch big football or baseball games. "The great secular holiday in America is Super Bowl Sunday. Even in the deep south, the biggest mega-church changes its schedule to suit the Super Bowl," Kosmin said.

He also pointed to social trends – greater divorce rates, gay marriage and much higher percentages of people having children out of wedlock – as other signs that the religious grip on society has loosened.

There are other indications, too. For a long time studies have shown that about 40% of US adults attend a church service weekly. However, other studies that actually counted those at church – rather than just asking people if they went – have shown the true number to be about half to two-thirds of that figure.

via www.guardian.co.uk

Archbishop Timothy Dolan's gay bashing letter to President Obama | Manhattan Diary | IrishCentral

So what to make of Archbishop Timothy Dolan? This week he sent a letter to President Obama  outlining his growing alarm about actions the Obama administration has taken that he believes 'escalate the threat to marriage and imperil the religious freedom of those who promote and defend marriage.'

What imperiling threats is he talking about?

via www.irishcentral.com

Unfortunately, in our times in which the religious rightwing and Christian nationalists exert growing influence on America, it cannot go without saying that though Timothy Dolan may write any opinion, including these fear-mongering and crypto-demonizing ones, even declare them from his ecclesiastical throne, neither he nor the Bishop of Rome he answers to has jurisdiction in the free republic of the United States of America, founded without regard to any church or religious body, any creed, or any sect of any kind. His opinion is under law as unbinding and as devoid of special status as is this website's, a rabbi's, Pat Robertson's, or a Scientology representative's.

Unfortunately, not all Americans understand that it is important for us all to work to keep such a separation of church and state inviolable.

Under the rubrics of the overarchingly important commandes of Jesus Christ to His followers--be it the oft-called Summary of the Law given by Jesus in Matthew 22:34-40:

And He said..., "'You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.' This is the great and foremost commandment. The second is like it: 'You shall love you neighbor as yourself.'"

or his challenge in Matthew 25:41-43 to His followers regarding Christian priorities of eternal consequence:

"Depart from Me, you cursed...for I was hungry and you gave Me no food; I was thirsty and you gave Me no drink; I was a stranger and you did not take Me in, naked and you did not clothe Me, sick and in prison and you did not visit Me."

--and given the state of today's economy and the povery and insecurity that abounds, one might reasonably assume that the Archbishop might be pouring all of this mental and physical energies into matters other than policy-related missives to the President. And yet, throughout history too many church leaders have been too keen to hope to guide someone else's statecraft (or even grab the statecraft role for themselves) and enter into worldly disputes.

Bishop, love your God and your neighbor as yourself; feed the hungry and give them water, reach out to the stranger--do not instead show him or her the back of your hand or the bottom of your boot--care and help acheive dignity for those with basic material needs, nurse the sick, and be present for the needy and the lonely. I would think that that would be enough to keep you plenty busy for a lifetime.

Poll: Americans Believe Big Gov't Messes With God's Plan, Christian News

 

A new study shows that a majority of Americans believe God is the guiding force that is leading America's economy and the government is too big. As a result, sociologists concluded these believers are upset about U.S. economic policy because they believe increased government regulation and interference in personal freedoms go against God's plans.

 

• (Photo: REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst)

via www.christianpost.com

Army's "Spiritual Fitness" Test Comes Under Fire

An experimental, Army mental-health, fitness initiative designed by the same psychologist whose work heavily influenced the psychological aspects of the Bush administration's torture program is under fire by civil rights groups and hundreds of active-duty soldiers. They say it unconstitutionally requires enlistees to believe in God or a "higher power" in order to be deemed "spiritually fit" to serve in the Army.

via www.truth-out.org

the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) sent a letter to Secretary of the Army John McHugh and General Casey, the Army's chief of staff, demanding that the Army immediately cease and desist administering the "spiritual" portion of the CSF test.

"The majority of the spiritual statements soldiers are asked to rate are rooted in religious doctrine, premised on a common dogmatic belief regarding the meaning of life and the interconnectedness of living beings," the letter further states. "The statements in the tests and remedial materials repeatedly promote the importance of being a believer of something over electing to be a nonbeliever. Moreover, the images that accompany portions of the CSF Training Modules make clear the religious aspects of the spirituality training."

Ask Christine O'Donnell the Right Questions - Not if She is a Witch

The important question is not whether Christine O'Donnell is a witch, but does she believe the mythology spread by some evangelical preachers that Satan worshippers (which they call witches) are sacrificing thousands of humans in the woods outside our homes. Does she share the beleaguered worldview of those who think that demonically possessed humans are intentionally destroying America?

via www.talk2action.org

BBC Radio 4: Adam Smith, David Hume.... "The Enlightenment in Scotland"

In 1696 the Edinburgh student, Thomas Aitkenhead, claimed theology was "a rhapsody of feigned and ill invented nonsense". He was hanged for his trouble - just one victim of a repressive religious society called the Scottish Kirk.

Yet within 60 years Scotland was transformed by the ideas sweeping the continent in what we call the Enlightenment. This Scottish Enlightenment emerged on a broad front. From philosophy to farming it championed empiricism, questioned religion and debated reason. It was crowned by the philosophical brilliance of David Hume and by Adam Smith – the father of modern economics.

But what led to this ‘Scottish Miracle’, was it an indigenous phenomenon or did it depend on influence from abroad? It profoundly influenced the American revolutionaries and the British Empire, but what legacy does it have for Scotland today?

via www.bbc.co.uk

Richard Dawkins compares burqa to 'bin liner'

The Oxford University evolutionary biologist said that religious schools encouraged social segregation.

In one Muslim school he investigated for his documentary none of the pupils believed in evolution.

He said: "Their first recourse was not 'What's the evidence?' but 'What does the Koran say?'"

via www.news.com.au

While Dawkins' remark gets the media's attention, the story behind the story is the rise of faith-based schools in the UK. It started under Labour, but it's continuing and may in fact increase under the new Conservative-Lib Dem government.

Jonathan Weiler: When the Right-Wing Was Forced to Make its Case

Regardless of the final disposition of the gay marriage case, what the California trial and the ruling of Judge Walker most immediately called to mind for me was Tammy Kitzmiller, et al. v. Dover Area School District, et al, litigated and decided in 2005 (and chronicled in stirring detail by Margaret Talbot in the New Yorker). The constitutional and substantive issues in the two cases were not the same, of course.

But there are some striking similarities between the California and Dover cases and these are instructive for appreciating the nature of the contemporary right in America and of contemporary political discourse.
.....
[I]n each case, when a favored position of the right-wing was subject to thorough-going, fact-based scrutiny, that position wasn't merely found wanting, but was utterly demolished....

After listening to expert scientific testimony for six weeks, including from the leading "scholars" in the field of intelligent design, Judge Jones [in the Kitzmiller case] ruled that ID was...nothing more than a cover for creationism,... [and he] noted that the religious nature of intelligent design would be readily apparent to an adult or child.

Likewise, in the California case, the presiding Judge, after hearing copious expert testimony as to the "facts" of gay marriage and its effects children specifically and society generally, found that the proponents of Proposition 8 (those opposed to gay marriage) simply had no factual case.... Consequently, the court ruled, there was no rational, secular state interest to be advanced by the ban on gay marriage, only the perpetuation of prejudice (or, more charitably, of a religious "principle" not reasonably related to any compelling secular purpose).

via www.huffingtonpost.com

Weiler is right to not conflate a legal victory with a victory in public opinion or perception. 

A finding of fact in a formal legal setting does not demonstrate the efficacy of facts in the context of political discourse. In fact, corrections to misinformation or the presenting of facts in a political context--i.e., one without a great deal of critical thinking--can actually backfire and cause the further entrenchment of misinformed beliefs.

In a society in which partisanship is rank and pervasive, and in which partisan political communication is:

1. rhetorically savvy (e.g., merely evoking journalism's standard practices and ethics by way of faux-journalistic formats buttressed by commentary to regularly convey ideological bias and even specific language (e.g., talking points, buzzwords), and

2. psychologically gratifying to the primary audience (i.e., the communication confirms the preconceptions of the audience, flatters the audience subtly, or both)

rulings against Creationism or same-sex marriage bans can fail to change minds, and can actually be cited by anti-science and anti-gay marriage operators to support their messaging.

For instance, permit this speculation: the religious right is presenting the Dover case not as evidence of solid reasoning but as evidence of American cultural decline, willful back-turning against God by the nation, scientists, or an unsaved judge, or even evidence of a global, more-than-a-century old conspiracy--or mass, even partially subconscious self-delusion--relative to the evidence and reasoning accumulated and reconfirmed on a daily basis by biological, geological, archaeological, astronomical, and physics experimentation, testing and observations (and, when relevant, mathematical modeling) executed by professionals who are trained in skepticism, sometimes eager to disprove one another's findings, and fully aware that the ultimate prize and prestige in science goes to those who overturn long-held conclusions.

Evidence demands a verdict, and in the political communication efforts of the religious right, the evidence of Judge Jones's ruling in the Dover case does not further a verdict that the earth is billions of years old, that the universe is expanding, that there's only one biological language for all of life (i.e., DNA), that genetics points to common ancestry for organisms.... No. The verdict is: "What we've thought all along is always going to be right."

Rutherford Road Trip: An Interesting Conversation With...Two Liberty U. Students

I hear this often from supporters of the Religious Right. Their concern is that if we enforce church-state separation, it will lessen the influence of religion. If religion loses power, a corrosive secularism will take hold and people will adopt the view that “anything goes.”

There are several problems with the argument.

First off, church-state separation doesn’t lessen the influence of religion. Separation creates a platform on which religious liberty rests. People are free to engage in the religion of their choice or ignore them all.

Church-state separation simply mandates that the government be neutral on questions of theology; it does not call for hostility toward faith. The great flowering of religious freedom – and the diversity of sects we have seen here – are evidence that our government is anything but hostile to religion.

Secondly, it should be pretty clear by now that non-religious people can be good, ethical and decent and that religion is no guarantee of moral behavior. I pointed out to the young woman that many European nations, which are much more secular than the United States and where interest in organized religion has fallen, have lower crimes rates and stronger safety nets than our country.

Religion, I replied, can inspire people to do great things. It can also lead some to start wars and engage in violence. At the same time, secular ideologies like Communism and Nazism spawned horrible crimes. Blind, unquestioning adherence to any ideology, whether religious or secular, is the problem.

via blog.au.org

Frank Schaeffer: Understanding the "Reason" Why Fundamentalists Must Exclude Gays (and Other "Sinners")

Right Wing Fundamentalists...must hate gays (and other sinners) no matter what they say about hating the sin but loving the sinner....

Fundamentalists have to "stand against all compromise" because they themselves are in a constant battle with temptation and these temptations lead to questioning what they say they believe. And if they open that questioning door there is so much that is so plainly insane in their various scriptures that to even look into the room in their brains where all the dark little doubts are kept is to start a process where their whole faith will unravel.

The reason they have to hate every "deviation" is simple: At some point in their lives most fundamentalists do ask questions.

via www.huffingtonpost.com