Wings on Wednesday: Mourning Dove

I have a great fondness for Mourning Doves (Zenaida macroura), and we used to have a good population of them on property. Then the Eurasian Collared Doves (Streptopelia decaocto) arrived. The Collared Doves are considerably larger, and serious bullies. I’ve been missing the Mourning Doves for around a year and a half now, but they are coming back, and I’m so happy about that. I hope our nesting mums come back too, it’s a wondrous thing to watch baby doves outside my studio window. Click for full size.

WW1

WW2

© C. Ford.

Is Atheism on the Rise in Namibia?

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From spreading the ‘good news of theism’, he is now propagating the ‘gospel of atheism’ and from being the ‘Saul’ of charismatic Christianity, Keith, a former pastor from Namibia in Southern Africa is now a fire brand ‘Paul’ of skepticism and an unrelenting apostle of freethought in his country. Recently I had a brief chat with Keith and asked him why discarded theism and embraced atheism.

[…]

“Africans are still enslaved by these religions. Killings, maiming, raping and many ills are still continuing no matter how religious Africans are…Atheism and science to me are therefore the answer to the world’s problems”

Really? I only hope so. Keith further explains how the family reacted to his decision to ditch god for good:

“Well, I had been a skeptic while a preacher…you know reading the Bible more and more exposed itself that it’s ‘hoax’. Towards the end of the year 2013, I drew the line and decided not to be a hypocrite any longer and made known my true feelings. Of cause it wasn’t received well by family members and peers. The hardest of all were my immediate family (they are all charismatic born again members). Although they heard my story and respected my decision, it did not go down well with some of them. They still have this feeling that I would repent and join them again. They are still praying and fasting for that day to come. Wishful thinking and wasted prayers I guess. My mind is made up particularly now that I am having more knowledge about science and atheism’.

Full Story Here.

Related, Using Atheism To Reduce Maternal Mortality In Nigeria.

LGBT Roundup

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Tennessee’s anti-transgender “bathroom bill” has gone down the drain again — and it will apparently stay there for at least a year.

In March, a legislative committee had delayed action on the bill by sending it to a summer study session, but the committee, under pressure from the far-right Family Action Council of Tennessee, revived it in early April. Today, though, its sponsor in the House of Representatives, Susan Lynn, said she would withdraw the bill until next year, reports Nashville paper The Tennessean. Full Story Here.

"We must take a stand against prejudice," says a statement on the band's website.

“We must take a stand against prejudice,” says a statement on the band’s website.

The members of Pearl Jam say North Carolina would be a better place without its new anti-LGBT law, so they’re canceling this week’s concert there and asking fans to support a repeal of the measure.

“It is with deep consideration and much regret that we must cancel the Raleigh show in North Carolina on April 20th,” says a statement posted by the band on its website Monday. Full Story Here.

The iconic classic rock band announced today that it is refusing to play any shows in North Carolina in protest of an anti-LGBT law.

The iconic classic rock band announced today that it is refusing to play any shows in North Carolina in protest of an anti-LGBT law.

Boston, known for classic ’70s hits such as “More Than a Feeling,” has canceled three shows scheduled for May in North Carolina in protest of House Bill 2.

Tom Scholz, the founder of Boston, apologized to fans who bought tickets in a statement posted on Facebook. “The removal of the shows from our schedule is a major disappointment. It has always been my wish to inspire people with BOSTON’s music,” Scholz wrote.  Full Story Here.

Skye Thomson was supposed to meet with Pat McCrory before he signed House Bill 2. The confab never took place, but the trans ninth-grader still has something to say to the governor.

Skye Thomson was supposed to meet with Pat McCrory before he signed House Bill 2. The confab never took place, but the trans ninth-grader still has something to say to the governor.

While Thomson, a trans boy attending high school in eastern North Carolina, spoke to two of McCrory’s staff members, a promised meeting with the governor never took place.

In light of HB 2’s passage, Thomson wrote an open letter to the governor, pleading with him to actually sit down and meet with him and other trans youth. Read the message below, via the National Center for Transgender Equality.

Dear Governor McCrory:

My name is Skye Thomson. I am 15 years old, I live in Eastern North Carolina, and I am a transgender boy. That means I was born a female and identify as a male.

I was in Raleigh for the debate on House Bill 2 on March 23. I was the only transgender student who got a chance to speak out against HB2, the so called “bathroom bill” that is supposed to keep everyone safe in bathrooms. But it doesn’t keep everyone safe, especially people like me. Imagine yourself in my shoes, being a boy walking into a ladies room. It’s awkward and embarrassing and can actually be dangerous. By putting this law in place you’re putting kids like me in danger.

Read the rest here.

Atheist Scum Trying To Destroy National Day Of Prayer!

Atheists

Fox news got wind of the proposal for a National Day of Reason, and the stupid is on tap.

Two congressional representatives are sponsoring a resolution to create a secular alternative to the National Day of Prayer. No big deal right? Wrong! The nice Fox News Christians on Outnumbered say that this is another attempt, by “mean” atheists, TO DESTROY OUR CHRISTIAN AMERICAN WAY OF LIFE!

Sandra Smith continued to pimp the patented Fox anti-atheist agitprop: “Can’t they just leave our National Day of Prayer alone?” Doing some concern trolling, Harris Faulkner that her “biggest problem” is that this “causes a day of judgment” because it causes folks to ask others “why aren’t you into the Day of Prayer, why are you only into the Day of Reason.”

When Baker quipped that he liked her idea of a day for judging, Andrea Tantaros, with her comment about how “every day is a day for judging,” actually described Fox News! She “joked” that it is “rich” that those in Washington are calling for reason. Devout Christian Tantaros worked in the propaganda coup-de grace: “I think atheists in our culture have caused this culture to become so secular, so coarsened, and so godless. I think the atheists have won a lot of battles and they get most days in this country. Let the Christians have the National Day of Prayer, I mean really.”

Full Column Here.

16.

The largest mass execution in American history occurred under Abraham Lincoln’s watch. On December 26, 1862, 38 Dakota warriors were publicly hanged after being convicted of war crimes, including needlessly killing civilians, murdering prisoners, defiling dead bodies and raping captured women and girls. The charges, originally brought against 393 Dakotas, stemmed from their attack of farmers and villagers in Minnesota earlier that year. Although all of the trials were shams and many of the convictions were unfair, it is significant to note that Lincoln reviewed the cases at all.

The largest mass execution in American history occurred under Abraham Lincoln’s watch. On December 26, 1862, 38 Dakota warriors were publicly hanged after being convicted of war crimes, including needlessly killing civilians, murdering prisoners, defiling dead bodies and raping captured women and girls. The charges, originally brought against 393 Dakotas, stemmed from their attack of farmers and villagers in Minnesota earlier that year. Although all of the trials were shams and many of the convictions were unfair, it is significant to note that Lincoln reviewed the cases at all.

Abraham Lincoln: First President to See Natives as Equals.

The largest mass execution in American history occurred under Abraham Lincoln’s watch.

On December 26, 1862, 38 Dakota warriors were publicly hanged after being convicted of war crimes, including needlessly killing civilians, murdering prisoners, defiling dead bodies and raping captured women and girls. The charges, originally brought against 393 Dakotas, stemmed from their attack of farmers and villagers in Minnesota earlier that year.

Known as the Dakota Uprising or the Sioux War, the one-month skirmish came after the Santee Sioux of Minnesota ceded their land to the U.S. and agreed to live on reservations. Then, as the federal government turned its attention to the Civil War, corrupt Indian agents failed to provide food and white settlers stole horses and timber. “The Dakota were literally starving,” said Paul Finkelman, a historian and professor of human rights law at the University of Saskatchewan. “They had no food and people who traded with them refused to give them money.”

[…]

Under Gov. Alexander Ramsey, Minnesota held military trials, convicting 323 Dakotas of war crimes and sentencing 303 to death. But the trials—even those for legitimate crimes—were corrupt and “completely absurd,” Finkelman said. “The Dakota didn’t speak English and they didn’t have lawyers,” he said. “The trials were totally unfair.”

Under U.S law, however, death sentences could not be carried out unless the President signed the orders. In an unprecedented move, Lincoln ordered a complete review of every charge, and ultimately confirmed only 39 of the sentences (one prisoner was granted a reprieve).

“Anxious to not act with so much clemency as to encourage another outbreak on the one hand, nor with so much severity as to be real cruelty on the other, I caused a careful examination of the records of trials to be made,” Lincoln wrote in a message to the Senate in December 1862. The Army executed 38 prisoners by public hanging on the day after Christmas.

[…]

The centerpiece of Lincoln’s presidency was the Civil War, but he also contended with Indian conflicts and genocide in the Midwest and Western frontiers, including the Sioux Uprising, the Sand Creek Massacre and wars with the Indians of the Southwest. Focused primarily on winning the war, Lincoln allowed army generals to dictate Indian policy.

In 1862, Gen. James Carleton began a war against Apaches and Navajos in New Mexico, where gold had been discovered on Indian land. Carleton told Col. Kit Carson that “All Indian men … are to be killed whenever and wherever you can find them.”

[…]

In his third annual message to Congress, in December 1863, Lincoln urged Indians to reject tribal culture and embrace civilization, which included principles of Christianity.

“Sound policy and our imperative duty to these wards of the government demand our anxious and constant attention to their material well-being, to their progress in the arts of civilization, and, above all, to that moral training which under the blessing of Divine Providence will confer upon them the elevated and sanctifying influences, the hopes and consolations, of the Christian faith,” he said.

Full Story Here.

Dwayne Doc Wanna at the Mankato Memorial, 150th anniversary, 2012. Jackson Forderer for MPR

Dwayne Doc Wanna at the Mankato Memorial, 150th anniversary, 2012. Jackson Forderer for MPR. http://www.mprnews.org/story/2012/12/26/social-issue/dakota-war-commemoration

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The Faith of Christopher Hitchens

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Larry Taunton, a Christian author in Birmingham, has recently made TV appearances on the right-leaning Fox News and on the left-leaning MSNBC.

Taunton’s new book on famous atheist Christopher Hitchens, who died in 2011, has gotten rave reviews from prominent atheists, and prominent Christians.

I hadn’t even heard of this book, and I doubt it will go on my reading list. I don’t care for books that are going to make me want to toss them out a window.

Their friendship became so close they went on two long road trips together, with Hitchens reading aloud from the Gospel of John on one of them.

As Hitchens suffered and died from esophageal cancer, Taunton believes he was giving Christianity a kind of final review. Hitchens, who was baptized as a child in the Church of England but declared himself an atheist and burned his Bible at 15, never recanted his atheism.

But Taunton believes Hitchens gained a new appreciation for evangelical Christians who actually believe the Bible. “For the first time in his life, he was engaging evangelical Christians,” Taunton said. “He found them to be different from the veneer of Christianity in Britain. When he began debating these evangelicals, he began to like them.”

That’s news to me, but I didn’t exactly follow what Hitchens’ was or wasn’t doing. I don’t think it’s terribly surprising that you can end up liking people you also disagree with on some issues. That happens to most people, doesn’t it?

I don’t know if I can write anything ever again that gets universal praise from both the left and the right. This book is getting quite a reaction. The reception has been so kind, no nice. The atheist Michael Schermer loved the book.”

Yeah, okay, the book is a definite skip for me.

“I discovered Christopher is not defined by his atheism,” Taunton said. “Atheism is a negative and you can’t build a philosophy around a negative. Christopher was searching for a unifying system of thought. They’re accusing me of saying he converted. I make no such claim. It’s not my claim that Christopher converted, it’s that Christopher was contemplating conversion. I think I substantiate it in the book.”

[…]

In the end, Hitchens had created too big a reputation on his atheism to convert to Christianity, Taunton said.

“Christopher was in a difficult place,” Taunton said. “He’s a dying man. He asked me why I thought he didn’t convert. I said, ‘You’ve created a global reputation as an atheist, your fortune, your reputation is based on it. I can’t imagine how hard it would be to admit you were wrong. You created a prison for yourself.'”

I’m not saying he converted! Wait, I am too saying he converted! No, just that he wanted to convert! I’d think more of this “good Christian” if he wasn’t picking the bones of the dead to make a profit. Full Article Here.

This is Shermer’s brief review:

If you really want to get to know someone intimately, go on a multi-day cross-country road trip, share fine food and expensive spirits, and have open and honest conversations about the most important issues in life. And then engage them in public debate before thousands of people on those very topics. In this engrossing narrative about his friendship with the atheist activist Christopher Hitchens, the evangelical Christian Larry Taunton shows us a side of the man very few of us knew. Apparent contradictions dissolve before Taunton’s penetrating insight into the psychology of man fiercely loyal to his friends and passionately devoted to leading a life of integrity. This book should be read by every atheist and theist passionate about the truth, and by anyone who really wants to understand Hitch, one of the greatest minds and literary geniuses of our time.
—Michael Shermer

John Kasich on Anti-LGBT Discrimination: ‘Get Over It’

Kasich

Kasich

Republican presidential hopeful John Kasich’s answer to LGBT people turned away by businesses is “get over it,” while his advice for those business owners it to pray.

Kasich, the governor of Ohio, has said he wouldn’t have signed anti-LGBT laws like the ones recently enacted in North Carolina and Mississippi, but today on CNN’s State of the Union with Dana Bash, he said that as president, he wouldn’t do anything to stop states from passing such legislation.

“There is a legitimate concern for people being able to have their deeply held religious beliefs, religious liberty,” he told Bash. “But there’s also people who we shouldn’t be discriminating against. … We need to strike a balance, and I just wish we’d take a breath and calm down and take a breath, because you see, trying to legislate that balance is complicated and you keep doing do-overs, because nobody gets it right.”

He continued, “What I would like to say is just relax, and if you don’t like what somebody’s doing, pray for them, and if you’re feeling like somebody is doing something wrong against you, can you just for a second get over it?”

[…]

He also mentioned, as he had previously, that he had attended a friend’s wedding to a same-sex partner, but he told Matthews, “I don’t think it’s right, and the wedding that I went to, they know that I don’t agree with them.”

I imagine they know just how much you disapprove now, Governor. I suspect you don’t have all that many gay friends whose wedding you have attended. Kasich probably wouldn’t seem so bad if he could manage to keep his mouth shut. Full Story Here.

Something positive for a change

So much of the news regarding transgender people is all bigotry, all hate, all the time. For a change, a couple of positive stories. I wish the article about Mumbai used transgender people, rather than transgenders, which reads all kinds of wrong to me.

Jennifer Pritzker, right, and Brenda Cossman of the Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies at the University of Toronto, was in town recently to receive an award for her contributions to the field of sexual diversity education. Vince Talotta / Toronto Star

Jennifer Pritzker, right, and Brenda Cossman of the Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies at the University of Toronto, was in town recently to receive an award for her contributions to the field of sexual diversity education. Vince Talotta / Toronto Star.

Jennifer Pritzker is a retired U.S. Army colonel and a businesswoman. She is also thought to be the only openly transgender billionaire in the world.

The Pritzker family founded the Hyatt hotel chain and, according to Forbes magazine, is one of the 400 wealthiest broods in America. Forbes estimates that Pritzker alone is worth $1.76 billion.

But if money doesn’t buy happiness, it also doesn’t buy tolerance. This is why Pritzker, who enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1974, didn’t come out publicly as transgender until 2013.

[…]

Fortunately, Pritzker says, a lot has changed since 1974. Not enough, but a lot.

Determined to help foster that change, the military veteran and philanthropist recently donated $2 million to the University of Victoria to establish a chair of transgender studies at the school — the first of its kind in the world.

“Knowledge dispels fear,” she says (a motto she picked up from the British Royal Air Force.) “It helps people dispel fear of the unknown, of (for instance) jumping out of an airplane in flight.”

If you can train people to do something as inherently terrifying as jumping out of airplanes, Pritzker believes, it’s reasonable to assume that you can also convince prejudiced lawmakers and American citizens to accept their transgender peers.

[…]

“There’s still work to be done,” says Pritzker. But those who support transgender rights can take some solace in the fact that big business is beginning to understand the bottom line.

“Productivity and profitability will not suffer by virtue of inclusion,” Pritzker says. “I’m as much a capitalist as I am anything else. And capitalism doesn’t have to be a zero sum game.”

Full Story Here.

Participants holding a rainbow flag pass through a junction during a gay pride parade, which is promoting gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender rights, in Mumbai, January 31, 2015. REUTERS/Danish Siddiqui (INDIA - Tags: SOCIETY) - RTR4NPD8

Participants holding a rainbow flag pass through a junction during a gay pride parade, which is promoting gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender rights, in Mumbai, January 31, 2015. REUTERS/Danish Siddiqui (INDIA – Tags: SOCIETY) – RTR4NPD8

Mumbai: With an aim to make transgender community self-dependent, a national-level ‘Trans Empowerment Mela’ will be organised in suburban Borivali here allowing over 500 community members to showcase their entrepreneurial ideas.

The Mela, to be held on Tuesday, is being organised by Anam Prem, an NGO, with the objective of “making the transgender community self-dependent through dignified modes of income generation”.

“This mela gives a platform to the hundreds of transgenders across the country and will make everyone aware of their entrepreneurial potential. It would also remove the long-held (negative) societal perceptions about the community,” said Manisha Parab, a volunteer from the group.

Full Story Here.