On Friday the meeting of the Texas Board of Education began with a prayer offered by member Cynthia Dunbar, a graduate of Pat Robertson’s Regent University. Dunbar prayed “in the name of my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ” on behalf of “a Christian land governed by Christian principles…I believe no one can read the history of our country without realizing that the Good Book and the Spirit of the Savior have from the beginning been our guiding geniuses,” she said, adding that “I believe the entire Bill of Rights came into being because of the knowledge our forefathers had of the Bible and their belief in it.”

With the tone properly set, the Board proceeded to give final approval to a new set of standards to be taught in the state’s public schools. Voting strictly along party lines, the Republican majority decided, among other things, to remove a reference to Thomas Jefferson from history books, replacing him with the study of John Calvin and Thomas Aquinas.

The old standard:

Explain the impact of Enlightenment ideas from John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, Voltaire, Charles de Montesquieu, Jean Jacques Rousseau, and Thomas Jefferson on political revolutions from 1750 to the present.

The new Republican standard:

Explain the impact of the writings of John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, Voltaire, Charles de Montesquieu, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin and Sir William Blackstone.

I am all in favor of adding John Calvin to the list. The more students learn about his bigotry, his burning of heretics, and his dumbfounding notions of predestination, the better. His ideas certainly had an impact on New England’s Puritans; students should learn about the Massachusetts statute of 1641 providing the death penalty for blasphemy, or, for a lesser offense, mutilation of the tongue. They should also learn about the Massachusetts Calvinists who executed four people in 1659 for the crime of being Quakers.

Aquinas is a different matter. I’m drawing a blank on what relationship he has to the founding of America; his opus was more concerned with theological niceties like the different categories of grace and the nature of limbo. I suspect the board is just being politically correct here, tossing a bone to the Catholics if they were going to add the rabidly anti-Catholic Calvin. Being generous, I suppose Aquinas’ teachings in favor of slavery could have some relevance.

Part of the argument for leaving out Jefferson was that he didn’t have many original ideas, but merely implemented the ideas of others. Stretching my generosity to the limit, I could agree with that. Besides, he was a slaveholder, which ought to subtract a couple of points. But instead of omitting him altogether, how about replacing him with the guy who inspired many of his ideas, who has the added advantage of being one of America’s first abolitionists?

Jefferson planned the inscription for his own tombstone, and it mentioned only three of his accomplishments. Two of them were authoring the Declaration of Independence and the Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom. Independence for the colonies wasn’t really his idea, though. At the dawn of 1776, almost no one was in favor of that. Greater local autonomy for the colonies, yes, but not outright independence. When full-scale warfare broke out, though, Americans didn’t appreciate being shot at by their benevolent British masters, and at this “teachable moment” a little pamphlet by Tom Paine, written at Ben Franklin’s suggestion, took America by storm.

Common Sense was written in the unflowery language of a non-professional educated in the school of hard knocks. Among simple colonists it struck a nerve, arguing not only for independence, but for the even more radical idea of not having a divine-right king at all, but a republic governed by elected representatives of the people—an idea not advocated by any of the other thinkers included in the new Texas standard. More than 500,000 copies of Common Sense were printed—not bad in a total population of 2.5 million, and by far the number one seller in America for the entire 18^th century. It changed minds. Washington himself wrote that the “sound doctrine and unanswerable reasoning” of Common Sense was working a “powerful change … in the Minds of men.” Even John Adams, never a Paine ally, admitted that “without the pen of the author of Common Sense, the sword of Washington would have been raised in vain.” Six months later, the Continental Congress jumped on the bandwagon Tom Paine had set in motion, and assigned Jefferson the scrivener’s task.

The Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom, while highly important, also carries out ideas expressed more fully by Tom Paine in what by my reckoning is the most profound religious work ever written: The Age of Reason. From the outset, Paine rejects the atheist certainty that no supernatural force exists. “I believe in one God, and no more.” Yet he spends most of the book debunking the Christian Bible, in a manner rather contrary to Ms. Dunbar’s belief that the “Good Book” is our guiding genius. The Gospel story “has every mark of fraud and imposition stamped upon the face of it. … [I]t is impossible to conceive a story more derogatory to the Almighty, more inconsistent with His wisdom, more contradictory to His power, than this story is.”

Paine finds God not in the glibness of the God experts, but in the world around us: “It is only in the CREATION that all our ideas and conceptions of a word of God can unite. … It is an ever existing original, which every man can read. It cannot be forged; it cannot be counterfeited; it cannot be lost; it cannot be altered; it cannot be suppressed. … It preaches to all nations and to all worlds; and this word of God reveals to man all that is necessary for man to know of God.”

Calvin and Aquinas based their entire systems on “revelation,” the idea that God communicated his will to certain experts. Calvin insisted that revelation was contained solely within the books selected for inclusion in the Bible; Aquinas taught that God also sends revelation telegrams into the brain of the Pope. Paine’s treatment of revelation is essentially unanswerable:

No one will deny or dispute the power of the Almighty to make such a communication if he pleases. But admitting, for the sake of a case, that something has been revealed to a certain person, and not revealed to any other person, it is revelation to that person only. When he tells it to a second person, a second to a third, a third to a fourth, and so on, it ceases to be a revelation to all those persons. It is revelation to the first person only, and hearsay to every other, and, consequently, they are not obliged to believe it. It is a contradiction in terms and ideas to call anything a revelation that comes to us at second hand, either verbally or in writing. Revelation is necessarily limited to the first communication.

Paine then dwells on the evil that God expert power has done the world across the centuries: “All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.” He instead stresses reason and morality, eliminating the theological speculation of people like Calvin and Aquinas. But he shrewdly identifies the political problem with this simple approach:

Pure and simple Deism does not answer the purpose of despotic governments. They cannot lay hold of religion as an engine but by mixing it with human inventions, and making their own authority a part; neither does it answer the avarice of priests, but by incorporating themselves and their functions with it, and becoming, like the government, a party in the system. It is this that forms the otherwise mysterious connection of church and state.

Which, of course, is precisely the kind of two-step Texas Republicans are trying to bring to the public education dance.

So instead of just shaking our heads about how backwards these new standards are, maybe there’s an opportunity to make lemonade out of lemons here. A campaign, perhaps, to develop a lesson plan asking students to compare and contrast the ideas of John Calvin and Thomas Aquinas with those of Tom Paine. That could surely get some minds moving.

UPDATE: Lacking in the divine guidance that enables God experts to be infallible, I made a rather egregious error in yesterday’s “Texas Two-Step” entry, which I regret. The Texas Board of Education, back in March, had approved preliminary standards removing Thomas Jefferson from a list of political philosophers to be studied in Texas schools, replacing him with Thomas Aquinas and John Calvin. On Friday, May 21, the board made a number of changes to the proposed standards, and then voted final approval. When researching my post on Saturday I reviewed a number of news articles about the events of Friday, none of which mentioned any change to the Jefferson decision, so I assumed that portion of the March draft had remained unchanged. It is now evident that I didn’t look hard enough, because in fact Jefferson has been reinstated to the list. Aquinas and Calvin are still in, but an attempt to add James Madison failed.

On the one hand, had Saturday’s search revealed that Jefferson had survived the cut, I would have arranged the post differently, noting that if the God experts get two additions to the list, our side merits at least one, and nominating Paine as a substitute if they don’t like Madison. On the other hand, now that the deed is done, I still think the single best choice for young Texans to study is Paine, that contrasting Paine with Calvin and Aquinas is a wonderful exercise, and that almost any opportunity to spread the ideas of Tom Paine is well worth taking. Admittedly, that sounds a little like Bush defending the invasion of Iraq on the grounds that even though we didn’t find any WMDs, the world is better off anyway. But at least I didn’t kill anybody.

Luis Granados

A woman is alive today in Phoenix, Arizona, and the “pro-life” Catholic Church is busily doling out its maximum punishments as a result.

The woman, whose name is not public, was 11 weeks pregnant. She was also seriously ill with pulmonary hypertension, a condition that does not go well with pregnancy – in fact, the combination is probably fatal. An Ethics Committee at St. Joseph’s Hospital and Medical Center in Phoenix convened to consider her case. The Committee, which included a Catholic nun named Sister Margaret McBride, determined that it was necessary to abort the fetus in order to save the life of the mother, and the procedure was quickly performed.

As a result, Bishop Thomas J. Olmsted, head of the Phoenix Diocese, publicly announced that Sister McBride is automatically excommunicated from the Church, its gravest punishment. What does excommunication mean? She has already been demoted within the hospital, and I imagine she will be expelled from her order of nuns. If she has earned any pension rights within the order, they will probably be lost as well, since churches are exempt from the laws that govern the pensions of everyone else. No good Catholic may eat, play, or do business with a moral leper who has been excommunicated from the Roman Catholic Church. If she is inadvertently buried in a Catholic cemetery, she must be dug up as promptly as possible and moved away. Until she is moved away, the whole cemetery where she is buried is considered defiled.

Bishop Olmsted is not deviating from Catholic policy here. He is following it to the letter: Canon law 1398 says that “A person who procures a successful abortion incurs an automatic excommunication.” According to canon lawyer Colin Donovan, quoted in a Spero News article of July 2, 2008,

Conspirators who incur the excommunication can be defined as those who make access to the abortion possible. This certainly includes doctors and nurses who actually do it, husbands, family and others whose counsel and encouragement made it morally possible for the woman, and those whose direct practical support made it possible (financially, driving to the clinic etc.).

In a similar case in Brazil last year, a girl who had been repeatedly raped by her stepfather since the age of 6 became pregnant at the age of 9 – with twins. Neither the girl’s mother nor her doctors thought that either the girl or the fetuses had the slightest chance of surviving a pregnancy, so a legal abortion was performed. Both the mother and the doctors were then excommunicated. Interestingly, the father was not – church authorities specifically pointed out that his sin was not nearly as heinous as that of saving the child’s life.

Such a procedure could not have been legally performed in Chile, Nicaragua, or El Salvador, where the Church has succeeded in criminalizing abortion even where necessary to save the mother’s life.

For the Church, the survival of the fetus is irrelevant. Ivory tower scholastics pick out one of the 613 commandments from the Old Testament, “Thou shalt not kill,” and apply it with ruthless disregard for particular circumstances. For example, consider the ectopic pregnancy, in which a fetus begins to grow outside the womb. It cannot possibly survive, and allowing it to remain will surely kill the mother. A mid-20th century book by Father Patrick Finney called Moral Problems in Hospital Practice, that was officially approved with the imprimatur of the Church, was crystal clear:

Question 35. In a case of ectopic pregnancy, which has been diagnosed as a case of unruptured tubal pregnancy, is it lawful, before the term of viability, to remove the unruptured tube with the living fetus, as a means of forestalling the danger to the mother’s life, upon the rupture of the tube?

Answer. No, it is not lawful. Such a removal is a direct killing of the fetus, and is therefore forbidden.

This was directly in line with a 1902 pronouncement of the Congregation of the Holy Office in Rome.

In his 1948 classic American Freedom and Catholic Power, Paul Blanshard attempted to estimate from the available data how many American women died each year as a result of the Church’s insistence that abortion is not allowed even where necessary to save the life of the mother. Though his methods were far from precise, they were not unreasonable. He concluded that the number was approximately 1,000 dead mothers per year. If he’s right about that, as an average across the century, that would mean that more Americans died from this Church teaching than died in World War I and Vietnam combined. That figure, of course, is just for America, which has only a small fraction of the world’s Catholics.

Remind me: Why is the moral authority of the Catholic Church thought to be even slightly higher than zero?

Luis Granados

Defenders of the Constitution lost another round in court last week. You may recall that when Barack Obama was inaugurated last year, Michael Newdow and others filed suit to require the Chief Justice to administer his oath of office in the manner that is prescribed, word for word, in our Constitution. The Chief Justice had proposed, at Obama’s request, to modify the words by violating yet another rule of the Constitution, the one against government promotion of religion, by adding the prayer “So help me God” to the oath. The district court ruled against Newdow, and now the D.C. Circuit Court has affirmed that ruling.

In doing so, the court stated that every President since George Washington had added this prayer to the oath – a myth that I debunked last year. The court also said that it was too late for it to rule on a 2009 oath that had already happened, and too early to rule on future oaths that have not yet happened, a neat Catch-22 that appears to allow free reign for future violations without any judicial oversight whatsoever.

This matter brings to mind another situation involving religion in an oath of office, from 1775 France. For the preceding 250 years, officially Catholic France had been cracking down on its small Protestant minority. Six different civil wars were fought in the late 16^th century, which were finally put to rest when the leading Protestant prince agreed to unite the country by converting to Catholicism. A few years later, after being recognized as king, he issued the Edict of Nantes, guaranteeing perpetual religious freedom for Protestants and bringing France unprecedented peace and prosperity. But the Pope called the Edict “the worst thing in the world,” and a zealous Catholic ultimately assassinated the king. Thereafter, the screws on France’s Protestants were turned progressively tighter. One favored technique, called the dragonnade, involved the forced quartering of French soldiers (who were often not nice young men) in the homes of Protestants, until their hosts would agree to convert to Catholicism.

Ultimately, in 1685, Louis XIV announced that there were no Protestants left in France, and thus repealed the “perpetual” Edict of Nantes altogether. Hundreds of thousands of Protestants then fled the country, crippling its economy just at the time when Louis was nearing hegemony over all of Europe, thus ruining his plans.

French Protestantism was ultimately saved by Voltaire, even though he despised it as being even more unreasonable than what was then an agreeably decadent Catholicism. In 1762 a Toulouse Protestant named Jean Calas was brutally tortured and executed for having murdered his son for allegedly having decided to convert to Catholicism, despite overwhelming evidence that the son had simply committed suicide. Voltaire made the case a cause célèbre, hammering away for years at the total lack of evidence of the son’s proposed conversion, and the physical impossibility that his death could have occurred the way the judges said it did. Ultimately Voltaire succeeded in getting the central government at Paris to review the case, despite its arguable lack of authority to do so; by a vote of 40-0, the review panel concluded that a terrible injustice had been done, while blaming the intolerance against France’s Protestant community for the outrage.

At a late stage of the Calas campaign, Voltaire published his brilliant Treatise on Tolerance, demolishing the folly of religious bigotry throughout recorded history. The Calas verdict and the Treatise both made a deep impression on French public opinion, and by the time the future Louis XVI was ready to be crowned in 1775 he had determined in his own mind to restore the freedoms of the Edict of Nantes. But there was one enormous problem: in the oath of office to be sworn before God and the nation at the time of his coronation, he had to swear to exterminate all heretics from his dominions. He wasn’t king yet, so he couldn’t change the oath. What to do, what to do …

History does not regard Louis XVI as being particularly intelligent or brave, as he blundered his way into what became the French Revolution. But his strategy at coronation, though ignominious, is hard to criticize. Before the assembled nobility and hierarchy of France in the majestic cathedral of Reims, as he solemnly intoned his coronation oath, when he got to the part about exterminating the heretics, he mumbled. (For those of us who have difficulty with a language that only pronounces half its letters, spoken French often sounds mumbled anyway.) To this day no one knows exactly what he said. The presiding cardinal was either too surprised, too inattentive, or too timid (or some combination thereof) to ask him to the repeat the words. Louis would never reveal what he said; but when shortly thereafter he began removing the legal disabilities on French Protestants, he was safe from the charge of having violated his oath.

How different the Obama approach! The words “So help me God” do not appear in the oath as it is delineated in the Constitution, a document notable for never using the word “God” at all. This was no accident; there was extended debate at the Constitutional Convention about whether the fundamental law of the land should refer to God, and the humanist side won. When George Washington first took the oath, he apparently said it the way it was written; there is no evidence that any other President until Chester Arthur in 1881 chose to re-write the oath. Obama was simply pandering to the God experts by ignoring the Constitution, as other politicians do.

If there is a conclusion to be drawn from contrasting these two oath modifications, it is that legal formality does not matter as much as culture. Voltaire and his adherents changed the culture of 18^th century France by making people ashamed of the prevailing intolerance. Once that happened, it made no difference what the law prescribed – even a creampuff like Louis XVI found the backbone to do the right thing. In 21^st century America, the God experts are allowed to have such unquestioned command over the culture that a smart fellow raised in a humanist household like Obama knuckles under, injecting a supernatural element into a civil oath where it does not belong.

So we need another Voltaire, right? Not going to happen. What can happen, though, was foreshadowed by Prince Talleyrand in 1815: “There is someone who is cleverer than Voltaire, cleverer than Bonaparte, cleverer than any of the Directors, than any Minister in the past or in the future; and that person is everybody (tout le monde).” In the 21^st century, tout le monde is empowered by this marvelous invention called the Internet, which has the same potential for weakening the stranglehold of supernaturalism as the printing press had 500 years ago. Écrasez l’Infâme!

Via Think Progress, I see that Rep. Steve King (R-IA) thinks he has a novel solution for the problem of discrimination against gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgender people. The website Good As You posted the audio, which Think Progress helpfully transcribed, of a discussion between Rep. King and Tony Perkins, the head of the anti-gay religious right group Family Research Council. King was discussing how a Republican state senator from Iowa named Jerry Behn used to try and make LGBT activists guess his sexual orientation in order to make a point.

KING: And he said, ‘let me ask you a question.’ ‘Am I heterosexual or am I homosexual?’ And they looked him up and down, actually they should have known, but they said, ‘we don’t know.’ And he said, ‘exactly, my point. If you don’t project it, if you don’t advertise it, how would anyone know to discriminate against you?’ And that’s at the basis of this. So if people wear their sexuality on their sleeve and then they want to bring litigation against someone that they would point their finger at and say ‘ you discriminate.‘ …This is the homosexual lobby taking it out on the rest of society and they are demanding affirmation for their lifestyle, that’s at the bottom of this.

Rep. King unconsciously distilled the essence of what we could call straight privilege into an easily comprehensible form. He just explained how easy it is to be straight. He doesn’t have a clue how a person hides his or her own sexual orientation or what it feels like, because he doesn’t have to. He thinks that there is some insight to be gained from that story, but he is merely illustrating his blindness to his own straight privilege, along with the fact that upon first glance it may be difficult to ascertain the sexual orientation of some people.

But has he ever had a job where he had to hide a significant portion of his life from his colleagues, all the time, for fear of being fired for being gay? Has he ever had to lie or deny that he has a partner because he didn’t want his colleagues to know that he was living with another man? Has he ever had to tell his partner not to call him at work, because he didn’t want people figuring out that he had a boyfriend? Has he ever had to hide a significant part of his own identity, simply because bigoted co-workers might make his life miserable if they found out that he was gay?

This is what Rep. King is demanding that LGBT people do in order to be able to avoid discrimination in the workplace. And, as a matter of fact, this is what millions of LGBT people do at their jobs every day. Only 21 states, the District of Columbia, and over 140 cities and counties currently forbid discrimination in the workplace against gays and lesbians. Anywhere else, you can be fired from your job if your boss finds out about your partner, whom you were so desperately trying to keep secret, or finds out that you were seen walking out of a gay club on a Friday night.

Rep. King’s statement is just further evidence that federal protection is needed. The time to pass the Employment Non-Discrimination Act is now!

One last point: Rep. King is clearly talking about LGBT living out of the closet when he refers to “people wear[ing] their sexuality on their sleeve.” But the truth is, straight people do this too. Straight people talk about their straight lifestyle, they talk about their husbands or wives, boyfriends or girlfriends, they hold hands in public, they put pictures of their families in their work spaces. Straight people are very open about their sexual orientation. Why? Because it is a part of their identity, and there are no harmful consequences in American society for being open about it. LGBT people are demanding the same thing; they want to live openly, as themselves, in America, in their jobs and in their private lives, without worrying about harmful consequences that come about from bigotry.

Many people’s anti-LGBT attitudes won’t change over night, but a huge step in the right direction would be passing the Employment Non-Discrimination Act to ensure that no one can be legally penalized at work simply for their sexual orientation. To learn more, and to see what you can do, visit the Human Rights Campaign’s action page on ENDA.

In an age of PSAs and the Vagina Monologues, many of us consider ourselves informed and educated about institutionalized female violence.  “It happens over there,” we tell ourselves, pointing to remote locations on a map, barely envisioning what “it” might entail.  But some forms of violence against women are disguised as customs, some of those customs have crossed oceans to arrive here, and the American Academy of Pediatrics has created a loophole that will keep those customs alive.  Read the rest of this entry &raquo

Dorota Rabczewska, the flamboyant Polish pop singer better known as “Doda,” may face two years in a Polish prison for saying something unkind about the Bible: “It is hard to believe in something written by people who drank too much wine and smoked herbal cigarettes.”

In the current issue of The Humanist, I talk about the new blasphemy law in Ireland, and outline a strategy for undermining it by claiming that Christians blaspheme against humanists every time they say we deserve to be eternally tortured in hell simply because we don’t believe what they believe. The same ploy could be used in Poland, which also has blasphemy laws on the books. Perhaps even more easily.

According to a report published by the Council of Europe in 2008, Article 196 of the Polish Criminal Code provides that “Anyone found guilty of offending religious feelings through public calumny of an object or place of worship is liable to a fine, restriction of liberty or a maximum two-year prison sentence.” Doda pretty clearly committed public calumny against the Bible, which is an “object,” and lots of witnesses are lining up to say that their religious feelings have been offended thereby. Don Quixote had an easier time with the windmills than a lawyer arguing that Doda didn’t break that law would have.

So let’s look instead at Article 257 of the same Criminal Code. According to the COE report, this “offence is committed by anyone who publicly insults a group within the population or a particular person because of his national, ethnic, race or religious affiliation or because of his lack of any religious denomination or for these reasons breaches the personal inviolability of another individual.”

Does a day go by in which some Polish priest does not condemn the Godless? I doubt it. How about starting at the top? Just last fall, Pope Benedict XVI visited the neighboring Czech Republic, which statistics show is the least religious country in Europe. There he launched into a tirade against the Czech people themselves, railing about “the poisonous effects of a certain secularism and Western consumerism,” and accusing the large majority of Czechs who don’t buy what he is selling of being “sad and unfulfilled people.” None of this got nearly the attention that a spider did who was caught on camera crawling across the pope’s robes as he spoke. Now, if the pope went to Jerusalem and talked about the “poisonous effects” of Judaism, wouldn’t that make news? Or if he went to Mecca and talked about how Islam leaves people “sad and unfulfilled,” wouldn’t that make news? But when he goes to the most secular country in Europe and talks about the poisonous effects of secularism, we are supposed to sit back and nod our heads about what a wise and holy man he is.

Seize him! Or at least prosecute him. Doda’s many fans can mount an excellent argument that the pope and every Catholic publisher in Poland who carried his words (or amplified them) violated Article 257 of the Criminal Code, and it’s time for all the insults to their sensitive feelings to stop. This pope’s worldwide popularity is at an all-time low; it may be even lower in Poland, given what seems to be the current Vatican spin that the sex abuse coverup was really John Paul II’s doing, with Benedict taking the fall for cleaning up the Polish pope’s mess. If enough demand for an Article 257 case can be ginned up, then at some point wiser heads can step in and say “Let the pope speak his mind. Let Doda speak her mind. Then let the people make up their own minds.”

What this country needs is a detailed federal regulation on permissible prayer.

One thing just about everyone agrees on is that this should be a government of laws, not of men. It is fundamentally unfair to penalize people for saying things unless they have been warned in advance what they may and may not say.

Take Rev. Franklin Graham. Here’s a fellow who has raised hundreds of millions of dollars for charitable relief, whose son is serving his fourth tour of duty in Afghanistan. Graham volunteered to serve without pay as chairman of the National Day of Prayer Task Force, arranging events around the country to cooperate with the Congressionally-mandated National Day of Prayer. What thanks does he get? At the last minute, he gets unceremoniously booted off the program at the National Day of Prayer event at the Pentagon, because some bureaucrat decided that his prayers weren’t good enough to satisfy the standard. What standard? The secret standard inside the bureaucrat’s head. Our only clue is a hint that Graham is not “inclusive” enough, because he reaches the logical conclusion that if his own beliefs are true, other beliefs that contradict them must be false. With a published rule, Graham would know where he stands, and wouldn’t be subjected to such a terrific public humiliation.

Graham is not the only person these secret standards apply to. Last year, according to US News & World Report, President Obama launched a practice of beginning most of his public events around the country with a prayer, delivered by a local God expert. This is new; no president in recent memory – not even George W. Bush – followed this routine. Not just any prayer, though. It has to be a prayer that is pre-approved by a government bureaucrat from the White House Office of Public Liaison. Approved based on what standard? The secret standard, inside the bureaucrat’s head. This is not the way civilized government is supposed to work.

What kind of prayers would be rejected under a federal prayer regulation? The short but heartfelt “God damn America!” prayer of Obama’s former pastor Jeremiah Wright would probably be excluded. I’m also guessing the Good Friday prayer from the pre-2008 official Catholic Missal might not make the cut:

Let us pray also for the perfidious Jews: that Almighty God remove the veil from their hearts, so that they too might acknowledge Jesus Christ Our Lord. … Almighty and eternal God, who does not exclude from Thy mercy even Jewish faithlessness: hear our prayers, which we offer for the blindness of that people; that acknowledging the light of Thy truth, which is Christ, they may be delivered from their darkness.

Is it possible that the reason the Church wants to convert the perfidious Jews is because of the Talmud’s command for Jewish men to pray every morning, thanking God for not having made them women? I don’t think that’s the reason, but I do think that is another prayer verboten under the regulation. Maybe it would have been ok when Obama was running against Hilary, but not now.
Read the rest of this entry &raquo

According to published rumors, Comedy Central is thinking about developing a new cartoon series satirizing the childhood of Jesus, who wants to escape his “powerful but apathetic father” and live a regular life in New York City.

As someone admittedly clueless about what is and what isn’t a good way to make money on television, I’m reluctant to use words like “harebrained” to characterize this. And I’m an old twentieth-century fuddy-duddy, so I hope I’m proven spectacularly wrong.

Going way out on a limb here, I’ll predict that a lot of professional Christians will have unkind things to say about a show like this. If so, it won’t be the first time that Christians cracked down on stories about Jesus’s childhood.

There are four books today accepted by Christians as divinely-inspired Gospels, each of them written at least many decades after Jesus’s death. But those were not the only biographies of Jesus written at the time. There were dozens of others, and the process the early Church went through to decide which of these were divine truth and which were forgettable garbage is not one that inspires great confidence among objective scholars today. For example, why are there four Gospels, and not three, or five? According to the second-century bishop who was most responsible for picking the ones that made the cut: “It is not possible that the Gospels can be either more or fewer in number than they are. For, since there are four zones of the World in which we live, and four principal winds, while the Church is scattered throughout the world, and the pillar and ground of the Church is the Gospel . . . it is fitting that she should have four pillars.”

One of the early lives of Jesus that didn’t make the cut is now known as the “Infancy Gospel of Thomas,” now reproduced in Bart Ehrman’s book Lost Gospels. It has several stories that the Comedy Central writers may want to explore:

The Little Rascal:

Somewhat later he [Jesus] was going through the village, and a child ran and banged into his shoulder. Jesus was aggravated and said to him, “You will go no further on your way.” And right away the child fell down and died. One of those who saw what happened said, “Where was this child born? For everything he says is a deed accomplished?”

Fun on the Roof:

Some days later Jesus was playing on a flat rooftop of a house, and one of the children playing with him fell from the roof and died. When the other children saw what had happened, they ran away, so that Jesus stood there alone. When the parents of the one who died arrived they accused him of throwing him down. But Jesus said, “I certainly did not throw him down.” But they began to abuse him verbally. Jesus leapt down from the roof and stood beside the child’s corpse, and with a loud voice he cried out, “Zenon!” (for that was his name) “rise up and tell me: did I throw you down?” And right away he rose up and said, “Not at all Lord! You did not throw me down, but you have raised me up!” When they saw this they were astounded. Parents of the child glorified God for sign that had occurred, and they worshiped Jesus.

Respect Your Teacher?

Then Jesus said to him, “If you are really a teacher and know the letters well, tell me the power of the Alpha, and I will tell you the power of the Beta.” The teacher was aggravated and struck him on the head. The child was hurt and cursed him; and immediately he fainted and fell to the ground on his face. The child returned to Joseph’s house. Joseph was smitten with grief and ordered his mother, “Do not let him out the door; for those who anger him die.

The author of this book was working with the same kind of oral tradition evidence as were the authors of the books now attributed to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Will the real Jesus please stand up?

Happy National Day of Reason! Today we commemorate that most vital of human faculties, the ability to reason, while maintaining vigilance against encroachment on the separation of church and state here in the USA. And it is not a coincidence that today also falls on the National Day of Prayer, the congressionally mandated prayer day that was instituted in 1952 and is implemented every year by presidential proclamation. While this year was no exception, hopefully the National Day of Prayer is not long for this world.

For this National Day of Reason, which is being celebrated around the nation with commemorative events, city proclamations, and even a visit to Robert Ingersoll’s grave, I wanted to consider for a minute an idea put forth in a Los Angeles Times op-ed by the writer Marc Cooper, a contributing editor to The Nation magazine. He humbly suggests, in light of the impending retirement of Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, that rather than agonizing over the lack of protestants on the court, President Obama should do something completely different (and what some may even regard as radical):

Though the court without Stevens will be left with six Catholics and two Jews, the open seat should not go to either domination. Nor should it go to a Presbyterian, a Lutheran, a Methodist, a Muslim or even a Zoroastrian. If it did, that would make nine people who all have one religious principle in common: a belief in religion.

Clearly, the next person to take the bench should be an atheist.

An atheist on the high court? Is this guy crazy? Who would ever have supported such a thing?

While few sitting politicians have the political courage to name a declared nonbeliever, it is something that Thomas Jefferson (and several others among the founders) might well have done.

In an 1823 letter to John Adams, Jefferson was forthright about his views of religion, and Christianity specifically. “And the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerve in the brain of Jupiter,” Jefferson wrote. “But may we hope that the dawn of reason and freedom of thought in these United States will do away with this artificial scaffolding, and restore to us the primitive and genuine doctrines of this most venerated reformer of human errors.”

In other words, Jefferson liked what Jesus, the man, stood for, but could definitely do without the rest of the bunk.

For those who do not support the separation of church and state, it is one of the most supremely uncomfortable facts in U.S. history that so many of our nation’s founders were skeptics on matters of religion. Besides coining the phrase “wall of separation between Church & State” in his famous letter to the Danbury Baptists, Jefferson also edited his own version of the Bible, with all supernatural elements excised (perhaps this is why the religious-right dominated Texas State Board of Education recently demoted him within the state social studies standards). So I think Mr. Cooper is on pretty solid ground here when he asserts that President Jefferson would have considered such an appointment to the court.

So why appoint an atheist to the Supreme Court? Cooper says:

Having an atheist justice, however, would not primarily be a matter of identity politics and some sort of equal representation. Rather, a nonbeliever justice would be a mighty blow in favor of the secular principles of “reason and freedom” of which Jefferson spoke.

Heaven knows we could use some more of that stuff. Religion plays far too influential a role in our political and civic life as is. I personally don’t care what sort of superstition makes you sleep better at night, but I think we would all benefit if you left it behind closed doors and kept it as far away as possible from public policy. How about a policy of don’t ask, don’t tell?

Consider how many of the cases that go in front of the court directly impact atheists and other freethinkers and nonreligious people. For example, a stark reminder was provided last October as to just how obtuse a Supreme Court justice could be on the question of whether or not a large Christian cross on a government land preserve (ostensibly there as a memorial to the dead of World War I) actually constituted a religious symbol. At the oral arguments for the Salazar v. Buono case, the following remarkable exchange took place between Justice Antonin Scalia (a conservative Catholic) and the attorney representing the American Civil Liberties Union, Peter Eliasberg:

JUSTICE SCALIA: The cross doesn’t honor non-Christians who fought in the war? Is that — is that –

MR. ELIASBERG: I believe that’s actually correct.

JUSTICE SCALIA: Where does it say that?

MR. ELIASBERG: It doesn’t say that, but a cross is the predominant symbol of Christianity and it signifies that Jesus is the son of God and died to redeem mankind for our sins, and I believe that’s why the Jewish war veterans –

JUSTICE SCALIA: It’s erected as a war memorial. I assume it is erected in honor of all of the war dead. It’s the — the cross is the — is the most common symbol of — of — of the resting place of the dead, and it doesn’t seem to me — what would you have them erect? A cross — some conglomerate of a cross, a Star of David, and you know, a Moslem half moon and star?

MR. ELIASBERG: Well, Justice Scalia, if I may go to your first point. The cross is the most common symbol of the resting place of Christians. I have been in Jewish cemeteries. There is never a cross on a tombstone of a Jew. (Laughter.)

MR. ELIASBERG: So it is the most common symbol to honor Christians.

JUSTICE SCALIA: I don’t think you can leap from that to the conclusion that the only war dead that that cross honors are the Christian war dead. I think that’s an outrageous conclusion.

MR. ELIASBERG: Well, my — the point of my — point here is to say that there is a reason the Jewish war veterans came in and said we don’t feel honored by this cross. This cross can’t honor us because it is a religious symbol of another religion.

Consider the implications of a Supreme Court Justice actually arguing that the Christian cross represents all Americans! As if it were identical to our national flag or otherwise served as some sort of universal symbol!

This isn’t to say, of course, that a justice on the Supreme Court must be a nonbeliever in order to respect and promote the constitutionally mandated separation of church and state. As Americans United for the Separation of Church and State has documented, Justice Stevens, a protestant, has been one of the nation’s greatest friends to religious freedom and the separation of religion from government.

But with this new vacancy coming up on the court, isn’t it time, as Marc Cooper argues, to ensure that the large number of American nonbelievers are represented? Isn’t it time to install a voice for reason and secular judgment on one of the most powerful institutions in the United States? Isn’t it time for President Obama to nominate a nonbeliever?

I know, I know…I’m not going to hold my breath. But times are changing and the power of atheists, humanists, and other nonbelievers is growing. We’ll get there. In the meantime, happy National Day of Reason!

Could there be a better argument against government endorsement of prayer than the antics of Rev. Franklin Graham?

Having an official National Day of Prayer apparently means having a lineup of God experts praying at the Pentagon, so the politicians can pop up and show their constituents how pious they are. This means having our government pick and choose which experts get to speak, and which get frozen out. Billy Graham’s son originally made the cut, until Muslim God experts started to whine that he once called Islam evil. According to the officially prevailing theology of the United States Government, calling something evil is evil, whether or not the something is evil. (If Christianity is true, then Islam actually is evil – and vice versa.)

So Graham suddenly found himself switched over to the frozen-out column. He is not being a good sport about this. First, he goes and ruins Obama’s photo-op with his 91-year old father by showing up and demanding that Obama “do something” about his dis-invitation. Obama promised he would look into it; a promise which wound up on the same pile as his campaign promise to end discriminatory hiring by those feeding at the faith-based trough. Now Graham says he is going to turn up at the Pentagon anyway, leading some sort of anti-official-US-government-theology prayer on his own. He perhaps gave some hint about the tone of this prayer when he ridiculed Hinduism as a religion of hundred-armed elephants.

I like Graham. He says what he thinks, rather than being so PC all the time. I agree with him about Islam and Hinduism; I would just lump Christianity in with them, as he would not. What I don’t like is hand-wringing politicians trying to have their cake and eat it too, pandering for votes from the religious while trying to sweep under the rug the thousands of years of problems that have been caused whenever civil government gets in bed with God experts of whatever stripe. Neither did the Founding Fathers, which is why they adopted the establishment clause of the First Amendment, now largely a dead letter. If people want to pray, do Tarot cards, or whatever, by all means let them go ahead. Just leave the government out of it.

I’ll have much more on this, including a brief history of government promotion of prayer since Roman times, in my God Experts piece this Sunday.