ON THE COMING AMERICAN RELIGIOUS CIVIL WAR  (ARCW)

War is hell.  Little understood aphorism.

THIS MAY BE YOUR FIRST NOTICE OF THE COMING AMERICAN RELIGIOUS CIVIL WAR (ARCW). If so, you should date and preserve this warning.  Then your distant descendants (maybe the “Daughters of the ARCW”) can have something to be smug about–in the unlikely event that they, and this notice, survive the fires, and anybody can still read.

The ARCW has already been started by the superstitious. They call it a “civil war of values.”  The shooting has already started. They call that “protecting innocent life.” The purpose of the war is to overthrow  science and constitutional democracy and  to replace them with the Bronze Age myths and laws of ancient Iraq that became preserved in a collection of writings known, in translation, as “The Holy Bible.” They regard this undertaking as “bringing America back to God.” Loyal Americans should regard it as treason.

The effects of the stated ends of the traitors include: harming children by not teaching them about human sexuality; harming adults by irrationally circumscribing consensual sexual and reproductive freedom; harming democracy by imposing laws enforcing mythological interpretations of a supernatural being’s will; harming civilization by preventing inquiry and suppressing evidence that disproves the myths; harming human development by teaching that humans have a duty to live for some superstitious  spiritual world rather than for the world of flesh in which they happen to exist. The traitors do not view their teachings or methods as harmful, but neither did their pious ancestors who beat children and burned women alive for their own good.

The fanatics have declared war on reason and human progress. They have done this because they suffer from fundamental misunderstandings of the nature of American democracy and of the Bible.

History tells lies. It is important to understand this to understand the ARCW. A particularly harmful lie is that the United States of America was founded as a Christian nation. The traitors truly believe this because it has been taught them since they colored pilgrims with crayons in church nursery school while their parents were in the sanctuary learning to be more judgmental. As the young bigots grew into adultery(sic), they accepted this teaching uncritically, just as they accepted that everything in the bible is true, and that science is wrong, if not evil, when it proves that humans have evolved from non-human life forms. The traitors should, in fairness, be permitted to prove the intensity of this mental abuse in their defense at the ARCW war crimes trials.

America was not established as a Christian nation. To the contrary, it was intentionally set up as a godless nation. That’s why no god or religion of any kind is mentioned in our Constitution. This was so important that it was memorialized in the first words of the first amendment to our Constitution, to wit, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of  religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…” The people who started this country knew what religious war and holy terror was, and they wanted to be very clear that America was a democracy set up under human law, not religious authority or rule.  This was made exquisitely clear when, in a treaty with Tripoli, signed by President John Adams on June 10, 1797, the United Stated Senate unanimously declared, “…the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion.” That’s that, said the grammarian. People who don’t like the American way, and think church and state should not be separated, really ought to move to Serbia where they can kill and rape non-believers with impunity.

The traitors who push the ARCW think they are doing god’s will by trying to force their sacred texts and prejudices on those who want to dance to other celestial music or simply stay  home Sunday mornings and brush the cat. Before our Constitution, several states made criminals of people who didn’t attend the right church, or, whisper the thought, did not attend holy services at all. Some very wise people made us a nation where it is legal to stay home with the cat. If we want to keep it that way, it is necessary to win the ARCW.

 As the believers, who think the fault is in the stars and not in themselves, are waging the ARCW on many fronts, thus on many fronts must freedom be defended.  Particularly valuable allies can be found among Christians who find attempts to force their foot into someone else’s shoe offensive. After all, if the existence and will of any god were clearly known, there would be no need for faith or debate. No one seriously doubts that objects fall down if dropped, but there is  murderous dispute over beliefs that cannot be proved as convincingly as gravity.

This is a wake up call.  Don’t press the snooze alarm.  The barbarians are at the gates, and, because they encourage breeding beyond the ability of the breeders to house, feed, and educate the breedees, violence and social disorganization continue. As the most Christian nation on earth watches its civilization dissolve like a Dove bar fallen off of that ark, attempts to enforce irrational superstitious solutions will accelerate. That Branch Davidian thing was a sample. Lots of other messiahs are waiting. Maybe we can have court ordered Branch Davidian Social Services counseling for people who won’t share their wives with god’s anointed.  Maybe courts can acquit murderers if they believe god’s finger was on their trigger.  Maybe the barbarians will actually succeed in assuring that books, pictures, ideas, doctors, judges and military commanders share their vision. Then we will have a lot of interesting tribal warfare.  One useful defense will be humanistic hermeneutics.

“Hermeneutics” is a fancy word for biblical interpretation.  When religious types want to make something simple sound holy and mysterious, they often give it an important sounding high falutin’ name. This practice contrasts sharply with the usage of secular humanists, who, in explaining their views, employ simple words, that fall trippingly from the tongue, like “eupraxophy.”

Hermeneutics can be an important weapon to use against religious fanatics in the coming ARCW. The hard core nut cases– those who would control every aspect of our lives by forcing us to accept their understanding of the will of their god–tend to share certain operational assumptions.  These include the belief that:

1) Every word of the bible is true.

2) The English translation of the bible authorized by King James the First of England, completed in 1611, Common Era, is the only fully acceptable, authoritative, and inspired-by-god translation of holy scripture.  This translation is accurate in every respect, including punctuation marks.

3) The bible is the basis of all morality. Without it there can be no morality.

4) The United States of America was established, and should be governed, according to biblical principles.

5) The bible is without error.

6) No part of the bible is in conflict with, or contradictory to, any other part.

7) Hermeneutics can be used to clarify and explain those truths of god in the bible that might appear, to finite minds, to be in conflict.  The goal of hermeneutics is to reconcile all portions of the word of god (the bible) into a seamless, complete, infallible, and final statement of all past and future history (the latter is called “prophecy”), of divine law, and of how humans should behave and understand morality.  The bible, properly interpreted, is the final word on everything.

Ignorance, while regrettable, can lead to some interesting discussions.  As an example of how hermeneutics works, one gospel tells us Judas hanged himself after betraying Jesus.  Another gospel says Judas threw himself off a cliff.  Proper interpretation, guided by the holy spirit, reveals this to mean Judas hanged himself over a cliff.  Then the rope, or branch, broke, and Judas fell down the cliff.  If the author of the “Song of Solomon” in the bible appears to drool over a woman’s breasts, this is not to be understood in some sexual sense that would keep the bible out of family friendly libraries, but rather as a poetic metaphor of Christ’s love for his church. See, it’s really quite simple.

KAGIN’S COLUMN

                                   ON RELIGION AS A PUBLIC HEALTH THREAT

 My own view on religion is that of Lucretius.  I regard it as a disease born of fear and as a source of untold misery to the human race.   Bertrand Russell

The Christian Religion produces in many followers a kind of mass psychosis.  Belief in fundamentalist dogma is a contagious, addictive disease that destroys all thought that might challenge the delusional system.  The disease is so virulent and destructive to affected believers that it threatens the extinction of the human species through overpopulation, and must also be understood as a threat to the mental health of the public.

Christianity teaches an infantile belief in imaginary places and imaginary friends.  Jesus, the Blessed Virgin Mary, Angels, Satan et al travel from Heaven and Hell to visit Earth, perform miracles, impregnate Earth girls, and teach that we are doomed for eternity if we prefer being alive in this world to being entombed in a scriptural world.  Contentment is reserved for those who have died for Christ.  Everyone else if cosmic flotsam.

Rather than remain silently smug in the knowledge they are saved and all non-believers are damned, Christians attempt to make all human beings play in their sandbox and to agree with their fantasy world.  It really does make an enormous difference in how adults view the world if they were humanistically reared or if they were raised to think like children: to believe that a magical Being magically made everything, including them; that the purpose of their lives is to worship and obey the magical Creator so they can be with the Creator after they die in a magical place called Heaven, and that the Creator raised his magical Son from the dead– after killing him as a blood sacrifice for their otherwise irreversibly shamed and debased nature.  This is a message guaranteed to scramble your mind.

Fanatical believers in this system recognize a duty to force others to believe it.  This is a threat to the public’s psychological health.  Of course the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution permits the free exercise of religion.  But the Constitution isn’t a suicide pact.  If we can, through law, try to protect the public from itself by regulating smoking, alcohol consumption, and sale of firearms, surely we have the constitutional power and duty as Americans to defend the wall between church and state and to protect freedom of conscience from the force of ancient myths.

Fundagelicals are pounding their battering rams at the wall of separation and at the pillars of democracy.  They want people to surrender their personal power to them and share their pathological illness.  They have seen many changes and have been against every one of them.  What a difference it might make if their one life was seen as one to live for growth in relationships and for the discovery of knowledge that permits something beyond groveling before non-existent, capricious gods.