We faculty at UMM are about to go off to a Campus Assembly meeting, which is always good for making one thirsty. Fortunately, there’s a Drinking Liberally scheduled for tonight, at 6:00, at Old #1—it would be a great idea if we all stopped in for a little refreshment and conversation afterwards.
This is, of course, wide open to everyone of the liberal persuasion, so townies, out-of-townies, and students are also welcome to stop by.
John McCain is going to be addressing the Discovery Institute in a panderiffic event tomorrow. DefCon Blog has a petition urging him to cancel his appearance, on the perfectly reasonable grounds that no candidate should be giving moral support to such a contemptible organization.
I have mixed feelings about it. I’m no fan of McCain, and I like watching the far Right embed themselves ever deeper into Christian lunacy—I have this hope that someday everyone will wake up and see the whole Christian/Republican edifice as purest poison. So I can’t quite bring myself to sign the petition, not that McCain would care about my opinion anyway, but you others can make your own decision.
At least, I hope so. The “conservapedia” is supposed to be an alternative to Wikipedia that removes the biases—although one would think the creators would be clever enough to realize that even the name announces that Conservapedia is planning to openly embrace a particular political bias. Unfortunately, that bias seems to be more towards stupidity than anything else.
SWAT teams training for drug raids casually shoot target dogs, so guess what they do on the real raids? Fascist scumbags. In anything other than a police state, you’d expect the law enforcers to be held to the highest possible standards of conduct; in the US, the police with the biggest guns are unrestrained by ordinary decency. Slaughtering family pets is what I’d expect of a psychopath.
(via Jim Lippard)
Ugh. Jim Wallis. That left-wing theo-nut.
Progressive politics is remembering its own religious history and recovering the language of faith. Democrats are learning to connect issues with values and are now engaging with the faith community. They are running more candidates who have been emboldened to come out of the closet as believers themselves.
What planet is he from? Have American politicians of any party been afraid to label themselves as religious at any time in the past century? We see the opposite problem: they all declare themselves best buddies with a god.
He also goes on to do the usual post-hoc appropriation of every good idea that has ever come along to the credit of religion: abolition, civil rights, the overthrow of communism, on and on, glossing over the fact that we people of reason were fighting the good fight, too, and that religion seems to be one of those nonsensical foundations that allows people to argue any ol’ which-way they want, and that there people of faith fighting against those same good ideas.
I think all religion is good for is moral thievery—stealing the credit for the good that human beings do and passing it along to their priests and fictitious gods.
Stephen Frug gets even crankier about this. Please, please, get these raving kooks out of both parties, and let’s have rational policy making that owes nothing to religious nonsense.
Nathan Newman asks a good question about Mitt Romney’s rejection of the godless:
And at some level, why shouldn’t a person’s religious beliefs be relevant?
They should be. However, when one holds a minority belief about religion, one that is widely reviled, then it is to one’s interest to insist that religion be off the table. That’s a purely pragmatic concern. In addition, I think there’s an element of resentment: we atheists have been told so often to sit down and shut up and keep our opinions out of the debate, even by people who don’t believe in religion themselves, that we tend to get a little cranky when we see people of faith indulging themselves in a class of criticisms denied to us, or that trigger howls of protest when we say them.
There is also a sound principle involved. In the next election, I’ll be voting for a religious person for president—there won’t be any atheist candidates, and if there were, they wouldn’t stand a chance. I cannot demand that the candidates believe in a certain way, but I can still insist that they govern as a secular leader. That’s the best I can hope for.
But Newman is right that that doesn’t mean we need to lay low.
I think it’s a profound mistake for atheists to demand that such religious debates be taken out of the public sphere, since they will never be taken out of voters’ minds. Instead, us progressive atheists should be engaging in that faith-based discussion more vigorously, laying out our belief systems and helping make voters comfortable with our viewpoint as part of the menu of “religious” options, not in order to convert them but just to integrate it into the terrain of debate that people are more familiar with.
Otherwise, atheism will just remain the unspoken Other, which voters will inherently (and rightly) distrust because they just won’t know what it means personally to the politician involved. So I’m all for a religion in public life debate — and I’m prepared to argue for why progressive atheism leads to the kinds of public policy voters should want. But if we don’t make the case, we can’t expect Christian voters to want anything other than what they are familiar with.
I think debating in order to convert people would be a good thing to do, actually — a large voting bloc of vocal atheists would do wonders for the body politic. I think the issue is one of framing the argument in a positive way: not, don’t vote for Candidate X because she is a [Catholic/Mormon/Pagan/whatever], but do vote for Candidate Y because she is a rationalist who holds sensible secular values. Romney was playing the blind, stupid politics of exclusion rather than promoting the virtues of his ideas.
Read House Bill H0224, the appointment of a state poet laureate, and you’ll see what I mean.
I sure hope time straightens out the race for the presidency, since I find myself unimpressed by the entire field. John Edwards has just moved to the bottom of my list of acceptable Democratic candidates, after Hillary Clinton (after Hillary! That’s pretty low) since he has just allowed Amanda Marcotte to resign. I am unimpressed by the lack of loyalty he’s shown to his employees; I’m not an absolutist on that point, since I think loyalty can be carried too far, to the point of stupidity (case in point: GW Bush). But what pisses me off is that he failed to support her in the face of genuinely vile, trumped-up slanders from his right-wing opponents, people who’d never vote for him no matter how much he sucked up to them. That’s gutlessness, an even more unforgivable sin in a presidential candidate than disloyalty. He got his first Swift Boat attack — actually, more like a slow, leaky canoe — and he collapsed like a frightened rabbit.
So now I look at the slate of Democrats, and to my dismay discover that Obama is currently at the top. How depressing.
What cheers me up, though, is looking at the Republican field. I am perversely looking forward to 23 February, when John McCain promises to address the Discovery Institute. Watching the ‘maverick’ rip out his brain and hand it to the theocrats as his oath of fealty will be entertaining.
Take a look at the newly introduced California Bill AB 165.
This bill would establish the Office of Faith-Based and Community
Initiatives within the office of the Governor and would require the
office to serve as a clearinghouse of information on federal, state,
and local funding for charitable services performed by charitable
organizations, as defined, encourage those organizations to seek
public funding for their charitable services, act as a liaison
between state agencies and those organizations, and advise the
Governor, the Legislature, and an advisory board of the office on the
barriers to collaboration between those organizations and
governmental entities and on strategies to remove those barriers.
This bill would also create the Advisory Board of the Office of
Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, to be appointed as specified,
and require it to provide direction, guidance, and oversight to the
office and publish a report of its activities on or before the first
day of August of each year.
Yep, California legislators will be considered establishing a Faith-Based Office. That’s all we need—the legitimization of more unsupported nonsense in our government. Please, let’s stick to evidence based leadership, OK?
