This article, written by Michael I. Niman, originally appeared at ArtVoice, on 12/20/12

Recently, a friend in a small Mayan village where I once lived in southern Belize, invited me to attend the wedding of his daughter, who was marrying a boy from a neighboring village.

We’ve known the bride and her family since she was a small child, but regrettably we could not break away from our stateside commitments to attend. This was a traditional Maya wedding, joining Kekchi and Mopan Maya families from two different villages and Maya ethnicities together. And I’m sure it was a great celebration, with music, dancing, roast pork, chicken caldo, and all the trimmings of a grand Mayan feast.

The reason I bring this up is because people don’t have festivals like this, making lifelong bonds and celebrating the future, a week before the world is supposed to end. The Maya that I know clearly were not expecting the world to end this week.

In fact, nobody that I know in Belize, in the Maya heartland, surrounded by Mayan ruins and speckled with traditional Mayan villages, expected the world to end. What those familiar with their history did expect on the solstice was an end to the 13th baktun, a 144,000-day period comprised of 20 k’atuns, each having lasted 7,200 days. The 13th baktun, of course, is followed by the 14th, in much the same way that it followed the 12th baktun. Since this only happens every 400 years or so, this is somewhat of a big deal, like the onset of the Christian calendar’s third millennium in 2000, which honestly, really wasn’t much of a big deal at all.

None of this is really a big deal to most Maya, who, like most everyone else on earth, pretty much use the Christian calendar for their day-to-day scheduling needs. The move from the 13th to 14th baktun, however, is a big deal to a bunch of white New Agers who, despite not knowing a tzolk’in from a haab’ cycle, are quick to embrace ersatz constructions of native cultures. This is especially true when the myths they construct might promise destruction.

So, while Maya are aware of their calendar, and this historic change, they’re not freaked out about it. If anything, this is a cause for celebration, like New Year’s Eve, when we make resolutions for the new year. This is not the end of the world.

Of course, this wasn’t the first end-of-the-world prediction. They come pretty regularly. The Jehovah’s Witnesses, for example, predicted the world would end it 1914. And when it didn’t, they changed their prediction to 1918, then 1920, 1925, 1941, 1975, and, most recently, 1994. In 1999 televangelist Jerry Falwell warned that the Antichrist is living among us (as a Jewish male), and hence the end times are near. Harold Camping, who until last year was president of a Christian radio network broadcasting to more than 150 American towns and cities, used his radio network to warn that the world would end in 1994, later warning of a September 29, 2011 destruction, and, when that also didn’t work out, an October demise. Pope Leo X allegedly wrote in 1514 that the world would end in 2014. The Weekly World News has it all going kaput in 2016.

The problem with all these wacky doomsday predictions, aside from being baseless, is that they all predict an abrupt end. Truth be told, the end is coming. It’s just not coming all at once. It’s more like we’re swimming in a vat of water as it slowly rises to a boil. The flame under that pot was lit a long time ago, some say with the advent of agriculture and, later, civilization. Others more conservatively argue it was the industrial revolution and the carbon economy that set the wheels in motion.

However it got lit, the flame was turned up once again earlier this month, with the effective collapse of the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Doha, Qatar. The consistently record-breaking catastrophic weather we’ve been experiencing globally for the past decade has resulted from a global temperature increase of less than one degree Fahrenheit since 1980. Barring any significant action, the scientific consensus has global temperature rising approximately another six degrees before the end of the century. A four-degree rise would cause enough environmental chaos to collapse human civilization. The US National Intelligence Council lists climate change as a major threat to national security. But unlike your usual end-of-the-world scenario, this one won’t come, bang, all in one day, or even a week, month, or decade. It’s been happening at an accelerating pace for hundreds of years. We’ve known about it with certainty, conservatively, for about 30 years. But aside from branding environmentally destructive habits and products as “green,” because other habits and products are worse, we’ve pretty much done nothing.

During the previous month, we’ve all heard about the supposed end of the Mayan calendar, which isn’t actually ending. Except for a handful of cranks, we also knew the world wasn’t going to end on December 21. But the media still covered the story. And they covered it well. The Nexis/Lexis database shows that during the past 30 days the US newspapers and “news wires,” which are the sources for much of what is broadcast and distributed online, ran twice as many stories mentioning the Mayan calendar as they did mentioning the UN Climate Change Conference. This fact alone is terrifying on many levels.

Climate doom isn’t a certainty—that is, we still have a very small window of opportunity to take some very drastic and radical action to avert the worst effects of global warming, and prepare for what’s already heading our way. This is a tale of two doomsdays. One is nonsense, but it entertains us. The other is real, and unless we change the way we live, it will destroy us—or, more accurately, it will allow us to destroy ourselves. And that’s why we’d rather talk about the end of the 13th baktun.

Dr. Michael I. Niman is a professor of journalism and media studies at SUNY Buffalo State. His previous columns are at artvoice.com, archived at www.mediastudy.com, and available globally through syndication.

Last month’s headlines certainly looked exciting: “Italian church to be stripped of tax exemption,” “Catholic church to lose historic property tax exemption in Italy.” Wow! If such a heavily Catholic country like Italy can start making God experts pay property taxes like everyone else, then why can’t even less-Catholic countries – like this one – do the same thing?

Unfortunately, it turns out that the headline writers were doing their job: sensationalizing a story to make suckers like me take the time to read it, misleading without being technically inaccurate. The Italian church is not losing its entire tax exemption, just part of it – a part that largely doesn’t exist here, or in most other jurisdictions. Still, progress is progress, and it’s worth understanding exactly what is going on in Italy.

A church, operating as a church, was and will remain exempt from all Italian property taxes, even though it benefits from all the police, fire, transportation, environmental protection, dispute resolution, and other services that property taxes pay for. So will a convent, a monastery, a seminary, or any other location owned by a church. Everyone else, religious or otherwise, pays a little more so that the church can avoid paying its proportionate share.

In Italy, this bad situation is even worse, because since the days of Mussolini the Catholic Church has had far more money than it knows what to do with. So it has used some of that money to buy up vast chunks of Italian real estate, and use it for strictly commercial purposes. By one estimate, the church owns some 50,000 buildings in Italy, more than half of them of a commercial nature. Fifteen percent of Italy’s tourist lodgings are church owned.

That’s what the current controversy is about. If the church owns a hotel, for example, it pays no property tax. Meanwhile, the hotel across the street, owned by ordinary Italians trying to make a living, pays property tax not only for itself, but a little more to cover what the church isn’t paying.

To be fair, that’s an overstatement. Italian law provides that a 100% commercial-use property would be subject to property tax even if owned by a church. The issue involved mixed-use property, with some religious elements and some commercial elements, which under Italian law is entirely exempt from property tax.

So if you take that 100% commercial-use hotel and stick a little chapel in the corner, then voila! It’s now mixed-use, and entirely tax exempt. It doesn’t take much imagination to guess what you’ll find in most church-owned property in Italy.

Competing business owners have complained about this for a long time, and when no one in the Italian government paid attention they took their case to Europe. The EU has been putting the squeeze on Italy for a while now, and the current prime minister – a no-nonsense economist trying to pull the government back from the brink of a bankruptcy that would surely trigger a world depression – is probably grateful that he can use EU pressure as his excuse for ending this tax scam. By some estimates, curtailing the mixed-use exemption will net the Italian government as much as two billion euros a year.
Read on…

(Washington, DC – Oct. 21, 2012) – Humanists and atheists are mourning the death of humanist Dr. Paul Kurtz, former editor of the American Humanist Association’s Humanist magazine and founder of the Council for Secular Humanism, who died on Oct. 21, 2012 at the age of 86. His death means the loss of one of secular humanism’s most prominent advocates.

“Paul Kurtz worked tirelessly for decades to see secular humanism become accepted as an alternative philosophy to traditional religion,” said Roy Speckhardt, the executive director of the American Humanist Association. “The attention and guidance he gave to the humanist movement had an unmistakable global impact.”

Paul Kurtz served on the American Humanist Association Board of Directors from 1968-1981 and as editor of Humanist magazine from 1967-1978 before establishing the Council for Secular Humanism.

read more…

To hear the Catholic bishops talk, you’d think today’s hot-button issue of contraceptive coverage in healthcare plans is one of “religious liberty,” where the government is denying Catholics the opportunity to practice their religion as they see fit. It’s all a question of personal freedom, they say. Of course they are not trying to take away anyone’s choices; they’re simply trying to preserve the choice for themselves to have private health insurance programs that do not offer the particular benefit of contraceptive coverage.

This is a smokescreen. The truth is that the Church would prefer to have the law ban all forms of contraception, for everyone. They know they can’t get that in 21^st century America, so they try to come as close as they can, nibbling away at the edges to stamp out all the contraception they can while hoping the pendulum eventually swings back their way.

Proof of this lies across the water, in the Philippines, where the hot issue right now is the umpteenth effort to pass what is known as the “Reproductive Health” bill, which is strongly pushed by the Filipino Freethinkers organization. Yesterday, 10,000 Catholics marched in the rain against passage of a law that the Philippines’ bishops call “a major attack on authentic human values … that all of us have cherished since time immemorial.” Bishop Arturo Bastes of Sorsogon even encourages some unspecified form of “civil disobedience” if the bill passes.

Contraception is already legal in the Philippines, but so many Filipinos are dirt-poor that millions cannot afford it. About a third of the country’s 94 million people live on $1 a day, and a packet of condoms would cost almost as much as the weekly food bill for many. Why so poor? Well, in large part because of overpopulation in a country with one of the highest birthrates in Asia, which in turn is caused by the lack of contraception, in a classic positive feedback loop. In fact, 10% of the Philippine population has simply abandoned the country, to try to find a decent life somewhere else. The Reproductive Health bill would make contraceptives freely available to all in the Philippines, just as the U.S. Medicaid program makes contraception available to women who qualify for it in this country. The bill doesn’t require anyone to use contraceptives, it doesn’t suggest any limit on family sizes, and it doesn’t authorize abortion, which is prohibited by the Philippine constitution. It simply gives poor women a realistic choice, a chance to let their own consciences be their guides. Since 44% of pregnancies are unwanted among the Philippines’ poorest classes, this is a choice many of them would evidently like to have. Moreover, about 90,000 Filipinas suffer from illegal abortion complications each year, and an estimated 1,000 of them die; among those who carry their pregnancies to term, the childbirth mortality rate is quadruple the Millennium Development Goals rate.

A church that truly believed in “freedom of conscience” would be all for giving people choices. A church that wanted contraception to be illegal for everyone, period, would be against it. A church not bashful about employing the most blatant hypocrisy to get its way would say it’s for “freedom of conscience” in one country, while conniving against freedom of conscience in another.

Philippine congressman Manny Pacquiao, better known as the best boxer in the world and by far the most famous person in the country, pulls no punches. He simply points out that “God said go forth and multiply. He did not say go and have just one or two children.” This mirrors the official church catechism position that “Sacred Scripture and the Church’s traditional practice see in large families a sign of God’s blessing.” Interestingly, Pacquiao’s wife admits that she actually uses contraceptive pills herself; but rules God experts impose on others often don’t apply to themselves.

Until 2008, contraceptives were provided to poor Filipinas by a U.S. AID program, but the Bush administration caved in to Catholic pressure and phased that out. I don’t know whether it’s budgetary considerations or continued deference to God experts that has prevented the Obama administration from resurrecting the program, but this is really something the Philippines ought to be doing for itself anyway; we’re a little short of cash these days.

The Philippine church has its own interesting approach to the birthrate issue. Couples should simply abstain from sexual relations altogether during Lent, which comprises 40/365 or about 11% of the year. That’s what Archbishop Paciano Aniceto of Pampanga, chairman of the Philippine bishops’ commission on family and life, recommends. After all, he says, “It’s in the Bible that the Jewish priest cannot officiate in the Holy of Holies unless he abstains from conjugal act with the wife.”

The bishops’ objection to the Reproductive Health bill is not limited to its contraceptive choice aspect. They also hate the fact that it provides for comprehensive sex education in Philippine schools. “Sex is not a game that should be taught to children,” harrumphs Manila Archbishop Gaudencio Rosales. A little education might be useful in a country where 22% of married women of reproductive age want to avoid pregnancy but are still not using any family planning method.

Since the argument against freedom of choice for contraception is tough for the church to make, it is creating red herrings to attack. One senator has darkly announced his discovery of a “plot of a foreign group to smuggle abortion into the bill,” even though the bill doesn’t include abortion, never has, and cannot do so under the Philippine constitution. In fact, the bill actually increases the penalties for already-illegal abortion. Disregarding the old-fashioned preference for some semblance of factuality in argument makes the church’s task much easier; Archbishop Cruz warns that artificial contraceptives are “designed to ruin health.” Although the Philippines’ AIDS infection rate doubled when the US condom program wound down, the bishops claim that condoms are ineffective in preventing AIDS, in the face of incontrovertible WHO evidence to the contrary.

Opponents of the bill argue that overpopulation is not the Philippines’ main problem, corruption is. Maybe so. It’s interesting, though, that the political leader of the anti-contraception forces is former president Gloria Arroyo, who recently emerged from imprisonment for, um, corruption. The current president, Benigno Aquino, has become a strong supporter of the bill, despite the fact that the church threatens to excommunicate him if it passes. (If America were to elect a Catholic president who continued to run a Medicaid system that offers the same contraception choices that the Philippine bill would offer, would he or she be excommunicated as well? Since Medicaid is as much a state as a federal program, how about a Catholic governor?)

Here’s an argument being test-marketed in the Philippines that you can expect to start hearing in America: many common forms of contraception actually are abortion, so a legal ban on abortion means a legal ban on at least these forms of contraception as well. IUD’s, for example. These don’t prevent the sperm from fertilizing the egg, they prevent the fertilized egg from implanting itself. In other words, they murder little human beings. The same thing can happen with the contraceptive pill; sometimes it prevents fertilization, but other times it kills off a newly fertilized egg, which is why the “Plan B” post-sex pill is really just a higher dosage of the regular pill. How to tell the difference? Well, you can’t. And when you’re dealing with human life, better safe than sorry, right? So when President Romney replaces Justice Ginsburg with the fifth vote against Roe v. Wade and states start re-enforcing existing criminal abortion laws, expect some challenges to these forms of contraception as well, with today’s “freedom of conscience” rhetoric quietly shelved.

Luis Granados

It’s too hard to list all the appropriate adjectives and accolades that could proceed Gore Vidal’s name. Gore Vidal died tonight and the enlightened world mourns. But what a life he lived!

Please read the American Humanist Association’s obituary for Mr. Vidal, who was AHA’s honorary president since 2009. I had the honor of interviewing him, together with AHA president David Niose, at Vidal’s home in the Hollywood Hills in August 2009. That was almost exactly three years ago, and Gore, 83, was a lion even then. We should all hope to have such fire (and carry the humanist torch) at that age.

I had my first experience with godless comfort when a woman at my job lost her father. I found her in the break room crying uncontrollably, the pain seeping from every inch of her. Embracing her, I encouraged her to express her feelings–her confusion, her anger, her sorrow. I held her in silence as she sobbed for several minutes.

If it had been an earlier time, I would have prayed for her. I would have “rebuked the devil” and begged God for his grace and mercy, for his protection over the soul of my co-worker’s father. I would’ve prayed that she find peace and comfort in her bereavement, letting her know she would surely see her father again.

But I couldn’t do any of that. Having admitted to myself a few weeks earlier that I was an atheist and humanist, I would have been lying if I’d told her I’d pray.

We’re all going to lose loved ones and witness others’ losses, no matter our beliefs. Last week’s devastating movie-theater shooting in Aurora, Colo., reminded us of that discomforting fact. But sadly, we live in a society in which some believe these terrible things not only happen for a good reason but can be soothed with divine intervention. I can’t recall the amount of prayers that flooded my Facebook wall. Supplications to God were everywhere–on blogs, on major news sites, on television. Some even suggested that although God didn’t stop the massacre because he was upset with our demands for a secular nation, he can surely comfort the bereaved and injured. Makes perfect sense.

What, however, do the now 19 percent of us who have no religious affiliation say to grieving human beings when we don’t believe a prayer will work? Insisting our thoughts are with someone is considerate, but there’s no real emotion in that. We’re not really thinking in tragedies–we’re feeling. We feel outraged. We feel violated. We feel sad. And we know a few nods toward the sky won’t change any of that.

I believe the simplest way for humanists to express sincere sympathy, remorse, or grief is to act. That’s what I did when my co-worker was grieving: After I listened to her, I bought her a beautiful white vase of flowers. Was that going to bring her father back? No. Was she going to jump for joy? Of course not. But the small gift was my way of showing her I cared.

A prayer might be psychologically soothing, but it won’t help. Neither will the radio-like waves of positive thoughts we hope to transmit to grieving minds and hearts. All we can do for the people of Aurora and for those around us is to act. We can express our human feelings first, then help where we can. If we’re able, we can send money for medical expenses or funeral costs. We can sit with those near us who are in pain. Even if it’s through technology, we can be there for each other, human to human. When we’re at our lowest, that connection is all we can be certain is real.

The man upstairs likes sending mixed messages.

George Zimmerman, the man charged with the Feb. 26 death of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, insisted during a television interview with Sean Hannity that the shooting was “all God’s plan.”

Martin’s father Tracy replied, “We must worship a different God. There is no way that my God wanted George Zimmerman to murder my teenage son.”

Oh dear. Let me start by saying that I can understand why Martin is perplexed. One would hope that a god who’s supposed to be loving and merciful would not plan for an unarmed teenager to be killed while walking home with Skittles and iced tea.

But, just to play devil’s–or God’s?–advocate, perhaps Zimmerman makes sense. Maybe his god really did want him to shoot Trayvon. Maybe he was praying for an answer during that rainy night in Sanford, Florida, and that’s the answer “God” gave him.

My big, obvious problem with this debate is that, well, who can really know what God wants? To get really technical, I could point to the story of Abraham and Isaac (Genesis 22: 1-19), which may indicate that God likes the killing of teenage sons. But of course, modern-day Christians would insist I’d taken that passage out of context. All that, however, is beside the point.

Knowing what God wants has been an issue for millennia, and maybe if He could send better signals, his followers wouldn’t be split into approximately 38,000 different denominations. Maybe he wouldn’t forbid and order killing simultaneously. If God’s desires were clear to everyone, perhaps Trayvon Martin would still be alive.

Or, maybe a horrible thing happened that night as the result of human, not divine, will. Maybe there was no grand plan to kill nor save young Trayvon. Maybe what “god” wants is only what we want at the moment. Maybe it’s just an unfortunate fact of the universe that bad things happen, and maybe none of those things are part of a greater plan.

And maybe there’s no man upstairs, either.

Although I’m a happy humanist, I must admit that there are certain things I miss about church. I miss gathering with friends and family, swaying to the band, and feeling inspired. I also miss going out to eat afterwards, but I can do that anytime.

So, I’m delighted to hear that the Military Association of Atheists and Freethinkers is offering “alternatives to church” programs during summer training at U.S. military academies. Nonbelievers and skeptics in the armed forces will now have a place to ask questions, connect with like-minded people, and reduce stress in their lives.

But of course, not everyone’s pleased, including former Navy Chaplain Gordon James Klingenschmitt. When asked about the campaign, he said:

I think it’s sad how atheists are using a government forum and resources to openly recruit Christian cadets into atheism or secular humanism. What should Christian parents think, when their 18-year-old son or daughter is promised donuts, but gets a lecture about ‘letting go of God’ and proselytizing into rejecting their parents’ faith? Atheists define themselves by what they are against (God), not by any good they stand for. But the Bible says ‘the fool says in his heart, there is no God.’

I’m not going to get into the Bible-as-evidence part. We all know how that goes. What irritates me more is the idea that military humanists and atheists are trying to “recruit” new members. Freethinking requires no baptism process, no special prayer to confess, and no strict set of guidelines to follow. If a cadet attends the meeting and realizes he or she isn’t interested in giving up God, no one will condemn said cadet to hell.

Chaplain James Klingenschmitt has a point that atheists “define themselves by what they are against” (though I wouldn’t call a lack of belief being “against” something), but he doesn’t seem to realize that many atheists take their nonbelief a step further–into humanism. Humanists do define themselves by the “good they stand for.” Atheism says nothing about a person’s morals. Humanism does. And it seems to me that the MAAF is just trying to provide a place for humanists to congregate, a place that provides social interaction akin to the church but free of the supernatural stuff. No harm there.

In the meantime, I’m still looking for such a place in my civilian life.  I’d have no problem waking up on Sunday to hear a good (secular) message, interact with friends, and eat afterwards. Best of all, I won’t have to pray for forgiveness if I decide to sleep in instead.

I was shocked the first time I saw a pregnant teenager. I was in the ninth grade, and a girl I had known for three years came back from summer vacation with a big, hard belly. She walked the halls quietly with her dark eyes downcast, making sure to not to speak what was already obvious. I’d heard about teenagers having unprotected sex and getting pregnant, but I’d never seen a real live 14-year-old mother-to-be. It was surreal.

After that, pregnancies were no longer surprising at my Gulfport, Mississippi, school. Upperclassmen and freshmen, white and black, popular and not-so-popular girls grew bellies. The most seemingly innocent girls in school disappeared from the social scene only to return with child or with adoption rumors swirling over their heads. Some even came back with husbands, but that was rare.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Mississippi had 55 births per 1,000 teens aged 15 to 19 in 2010, 60 percent higher than the U.S. average. Having seen so many young pregnant women during my high school years–their college dreams stalled, their families further strained–it pains me to know that teenage girls in Mississippi may no longer have the option to terminate their pregnancy if that’s what they decide is best for them.  HB1390, a law signed in April that would require a facility’s physicians to have admitting privileges at a local hospital and be board-certified obstetrician-gynecologists, in effect ends abortion entirely in the state. Because such privileges are tough to acquire, Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the only abortion clinic left, would be shuttered.

While U.S. District Judge Daniel P. Jordan III continues to block the law thus keeping the clinic open for now, I feel it may all be for naught. Gov. Phil Bryant couldn’t care less about not having a place for women to seek safe abortions in the state, and Republican Lt. Gov. Tate Reeves thinks the law “protect[s] women.” Neither of them seem to have considered that low-income, mostly black women are the ones who will suffer from this law. And even though my old Southern Baptist church is home to many of these women, I can’t help feeling that everyone is dancing in the pews. They’re not only “protecting” women’s rights, but God’s plan. That’s not easy to fight with.

Abortions are certainly not the only answer for unexpected pregnancies, but it would be a disgrace, to say the least, if Mississippi women lose that option entirely. It’s already enough that women have to travel to the state’s capital for the procedure–driving 200 miles away to Alabama, Louisiana, or Tennessee puts even more financial strain on families.

High school students have enough to contend with as it is. The GOP-led Mississippi legislature, however, doesn’t seem to care. They’re doing what they think is divinely ordered, a noble cause to save all of God’s precious unborn children. Sadly, impoverished girls and women will foot the bill.

It’s uncommon, to put it mildly, for an R&B singer to admit he’s gay. While rumors abound for certain beloved crooners, no popular contemporary artists have come out of the closet.

Well, one brave guy changed all that last week. Singer-songwriter Frank Ocean posted an eloquent account of his first love–who just so happened to be man. The unprecedented admission set the social media ablaze: Never before had any young black man in the music industry been so cavalier about his sexuality, especially a young man who appears stereotypically masculine. A slew of fans (including Beyonce) praised Ocean’s honesty, and popular bloggers took to their keyboards to analyze the impact Ocean’s confession would have on the masses.

But even as LGBT acceptance grows in the United States, the African American community remains largely against equal marriage and overtly homophobic in some circles, including Ocean’s hip-hop ensemble Odd Future. For every well wish to Ocean, there’s a hell wish. Don Lemon, the CNN anchor who came out last year, explained the issue well:

“[To be gay is] quite different for an African-American male… It’s about the worst thing you can be in black culture. You’re taught you have to be a man; you have to be masculine. In the black community they think you can pray the gay away.”

Some think the outing of a young black male signals the demise of humanity, a slippery slope toward the proverbial island full of men (come back 100 years later, and no one will be there, they say). Some say Ocean was just stirring up interest for his first studio album, Channel Orange, which was released today instead of July 17 as originally planned. But despite what fearmongers and skeptics say, Frank Ocean’s candor about his sexuality eases the burden for others. It’s evidence that a young man can be creative, talented, gay, black, masculine, and accepted, all at the same time. Ocean’s account is a small chink in the old homophobic armor, and in a musical genre that often derides or hides homosexuality, that’s a feat worth celebrating.