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.

Everything is breaking right for Mitt Romney this year, as his opponents do their best to imitate Joe Louis’ old “Bum of the Month Club.” Unless the same strategy that’s failed to revive our economy over the past three years suddenly starts working, it looks like America is about to have its first Mormon president.

Which is perfectly ok. Mormonism is no more bizarre than Christianity, Islam, or Judaism – it’s just newer. I wouldn’t disqualify Romney based on his supernatural beliefs – even though his bigotry would disqualify me. “Freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom,” he proclaimed in 2007. “Freedom and religion endure together, or perish alone.” He went on to condemn humanists in bitter terms:

It’s as if they are intent on establishing a new religion in America — the religion of secularism. They are wrong. … We are a nation ‘under God’ and in God, we do indeed trust. We should acknowledge the Creator as did the Founders in ceremony and word. He should remain on our currency, in our pledge, in the teaching of our history.

That’s still not a disqualifier; humanists get the same middle finger from Obama, who insists that religious faith is “fundamental to human progress.”

There is one big Romney religious scandal that really ought to be a disqualifier, though – unless he’s big enough to issue an apology.

Mitt Romney volunteered to serve as a Mormon missionary in France from 1969 to 1971. He excelled at the work, becoming a zone leader in Bordeaux, then assistant to the mission president in Paris, the highest position for any missionary. Hundreds of French were baptized into the Mormon faith during his tenure. He has never claimed to have preached and disseminated anything other than standard Mormon doctrine during this period.

During Romney’s missionary period, standard Mormon doctrine concerning race was exemplified by the Juvenile Instructor, a publication for Mormon children: “We will first inquire into the results of the approbation or displeasure of God upon a people, starting with the belief that a black skin is a mark of the curse of heaven placed upon some portions of mankind. . . We understand that when God made man in his own image and pronounced him very good, that he made him white.”

Mormonism teaches that souls exist long before the humans with which they are associated are born into the world. The official Mormon doctrine was that souls who had sinned against God before physical birth were punished by being born with dark skin. Mormon President Joseph Fielding Smith described this in 1935:

Millions of souls have come into this world cursed with a black skin and have been denied the privilege of priesthood and the fullness of the blessings of the Gospel. These are the descendants of Cain. Moreover, they have been made to feel their inferiority and have been separated from the rest of mankind from the beginning.

Bruce McConkie, the leading modern-day Mormon theologian, wrote in 1958 that “The present status of the negro rests purely and simply on the foundation of pre-existence. Along with all races and peoples he is receiving here what he merits as a result of the long pre-mortal probation in the presence of the Lord.”

When the Supreme Court began ending school segregation in 1954, the Mormon church was appalled. Apostle Mark Petersen stated that:

I think the Lord segregated the Negro, and who is man to change that segregation? It reminds me of the scripture on marriage, ‘what God hath joined together, let not man put asunder.’ Only here we have the reverse of the thing – what God hath separated, let not man bring together again.

Mormon-sponsored Boy Scout troops even discriminated against black Boy Scouts, because they had to hold church positions in order to become patrol leaders, and they could not do so.

Mormon doctrine was especially vehement on the evils of miscegenation. Brigham Young, the Mormon leader after Joseph Smith:

Shall I tell you the law of God in regard to the African race? If the white man who belongs to the chosen seed mixes his blood with the seed of Cain, the penalty, under the law of God, is death on the spot. This will always be so.

Won’t it be juicy to watch Romney run against the world’s most famous miscegenation product?

The relative darkness of the skin of American Indians, at least in comparison with that of the Mormons, was also related to their sins, according to the Book of Mormon that Romney tried to plaster all over France. “And it came to pass that I beheld, after they had dwindled in unbelief they became a dark, and loathsome, and a filthy people, full of idleness and all manner of abominations.” [I Nephi 12:23].

There was hope for the coloring of Indians who converted to the true faith, though. Spencer W. Kimball noted in 1960 that:

I saw a striking contrast in the progress of the Indian people today . . . they are fast becoming a white and delightsome people. . . . For years they have been growing delightsome, and they are now becoming white and delightsome, as they were promised. . . . The children in the home placement program in Utah are often lighter than their brothers and sisters in the hogans on the reservation. At one meeting a father and mother and their sixteen-year-old daughter were present, the little member girl – sixteen – sitting between the dark father and mother, and it was evident she was several shades lighter than her parents on the same reservation, in the same hogan, subject to the same sun and wind and weather. . . These young members of the Church are changing to whiteness and to delightsomeness.

Kimball was rewarded for his powers of observation by becoming the 12^th LDS president in 1973, five years after Romney returned from France. Not until five years later did another LDS president have a “revelation” to allow black males into its priesthood, without officially changing Mormon teaching on the “pre-birth” evil of black souls.

Mitt Romney was 19 years old when he left for France, six years after Kimball spoke, and nearly 22 when he returned. He was old enough to think, to vote, to fight, and to supervise 175 missionary subordinates. Instead of saying “I am not going to try to promote any organization with teachings that obscene or that preposterous,” he did everything in his considerable power to try to extend the reach of that organization as much as he possibly could. Not only has he never apologized for any of this, he is still bursting with pride over the entire missionary episode.

People make mistakes, especially young people who have been brainwashed by elders claiming to speak for God. Mistakes can be forgiven, but only for people who acknowledge that what they did was wrong and resolve not to do it again. So is Mitt Romney ever going to apologize, not for being Mormon, but for spreading vicious and disgusting teachings on race? Unlike Joseph Smith, I don’t claim to be able to predict the future. I do know, though, that the title of the campaign book Romney published earlier this year is No Apology.

Luis Granados

(Guest post by George Erickson)

Morning. The sun, shuttered by clouds that brush my Ely Lake treetops, is just a feeble glow. Were it not for the intervening Norway pines, I could see the Eveleth/Virginia airport, and a mile beyond that, my gaze would stop at a roadside memorial to a caring, progressive, Minnesota activist who ranked among the best.

On a day like this, when Senator Paul Wellstone (D-MN) and his wife Sheila were en route to the funeral of a friend in a chartered Beechcraft King Air, their lives took a tragic turn. Descending too low, and more than a mile off course, the Beech struck the trees, and we suddenly had a vastly different funeral to consider—a service to honor Senator Wellstone, his wife, and child plus several coworkers and two instrument-rated pilots who died in that inexplicable crash.

I retrieve a book from the table beside my deck chair, and as the wind sighs I turn the first page of a book that every American should read: Wellstone’s The Consience of the Liberal: Reclaiming the Compassionate Agenda.

The title says it all, for Wellstone was a truly compassionate man: “How can we live in the richest, most privileged country in the world… and still hear from Republicans and too many Democrats that we cannot afford to provide a good education for every child, that we cannot afford to provide health security for all our citizens?”

He was always that way. As a fledgling Carleton college professor who was determined to organize the poor, Wellstone was warned by the college trustees that he’d be fired if he continued his activist ways. He persisted—and was fired.

Fortunately, 1600 of the college’s 1700 students rose to Wellstone’s defense. Reinstated, he became the Carlton’s youngest tenured professor, and soon turned to politics as a way to improve the lives of John and Jane Doe. “Politics is about the improvement of people’s lives,” he said, “lessening human suffering, advancing the cause of peace and justice in our country and in the world.” Thomas Paine, the first great American humanist comes to mind.

With his green bus, he traveled aroung Minnesota, won the Democratic nomination, and campaigned against wealthy Rudy Boschwitz, the incumbent senator who eventually sunk his faltering campaign with a desperate, bigoted charge that Wellstone was insufficiently Jewish because he’d married a Christian.

During his years in the U.S. Senate, Wellstone, who came to be known as “the conscience of the Senate,” championed women’s rights, promoted single-payer healthcare, and campaign finance reform. He was re-elected despite a vicious campaign that relied on a Newt Gingrich strategy to always use derogatory adjectives when speaking of your opponent. Thus, Paul faced ads that said “Wellstone is a lying, hypocritical whiner” but rarely addressed the issues. He was labeled “Senator Welfare,” and was charged with wanting to take everyone’s guns away, and with supporting abortion at nine months for the purpose of sex selection. In an attempt to make liberalism sound like a crime, he was called “embarrassingly liberal.” (Nevermind that liberalism is defined as “favorable to progress or reform, favorable to freedom of action and thought, free from prejudice, open to tolerance and generosity.”)

Despite frequent death threats, Wellstone persevered, serving the ordinary man and woman—not the corporations and not the rich and famous. He had been targeted by Republicans as the # 1 person to be removed from the Senate. Undeterred he soldiered on, and on October 25, 2002, just two weeks after he voted against George W. Bush’s fraudulent war in Iraq, his Beechcraft fell from the skies.

Though just five foot five inches tall, Paul Wellstone took on bigger, more powerful, and often unprincipled foes, winning some battles and losing others, but in eschewing power, fame, and profit, and in representing John and Jane Doe so faithfully, Paul Wellstone repeatedly proved that he was the a superb human being.

I don’t know if you’ve heard, but apparently the government is to blame for a struggling economic recovery. Regulations and taxes are bootstrapping American business, and the only cure is free-market capitalism. Fifty-nine percent of Americans favor free markets, a central issue of conservative groups, particularly the Tea Party.

But after reading a McClatchy-Marist poll that reports 68% of conservatives (70% among Tea Party supporters) oppose cuts to federally funded social programs like Medicare and Medicaid, I’m starting to think they don’t understand what capitalism is.

A free market is one which is absent of government interference. It is directed by supply and demand. The idea goes that if allowed to trade freely, people will choose the best goods and services at the best prices. This forces costs to fall and quality to rise. Socialized medicine like Medicare and Medicaid artificially increase the demand for healthcare while the supply of health care providers stays the same, affecting the opposite outcome.

We don’t actually know what the exact outcome would be under a system of laissez-faire capitalism, instability being a key feature. No such market has ever existed; Hong Kong and Singapore are pretty close, but their governments spend public money on things like housing and education, thereby adversely affecting the market.

So just for fun, let’s build ourselves a pure capitalist mecca and venture through it, from the height of its ivory towers to its deepest ditches.

Once Upon A Time

You’ve never seen a city so beautiful. Its buildings pierce the clouds with their uniquely sculpted peaks. Each one is given special attention by the architect who designed it and treated like an individual. They are monuments that reflect the human spirit—anchored to the ground but always reaching higher than the generations before. Sure, every so often one will collapse by the negligence of an unscrupulous contractor, but the occurrence isn’t common and justice is duly meted out.

Commerce has made the best of everything available in the many pristine shops lining the streets— even sex and drugs. And quality is guaranteed; none of the weed is brown, and the prostitutes have all their teeth.

Despite the concerns of the family-oriented, these products that once fed vice have been made clean by bringing them out of the alleys. No one is shot because their cocaine is cut with too much baking soda. Customers can easily buy a superior product elsewhere. No one beats up their sex workers. They’d get reported to the Better Business Bureau. There is still corruption, but shrinking the size of government has made it much easier to keep an eye on things.

Education standards are consistently rising. Technology is advancing at an unprecedented rate. Rain tastes like candy, and everyone shoots sunbeams out of their jolly asses. They are all happy, healthy, and comfortable.

The End. A happily-ever-after of unregulated capitalism that makes everyone’s life better.

Atlas Sagged

Well okay, so not everyone. A free market prohibits government interference; no Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid or other welfare. Schools and other once-public services are competely privatized. Employers are free from regulations on working conditions and minimum wages.

The median household income is close to that of Hong Kong, where the average family of 3 brings in HK$17,500 (about $2,250 USD) every month, 42.5 percent make less than HK$15,000 per month. But at least taxes are low.

There are various charities aimed at educating the poverty-stricken, but there are too many to care for and generosity hasn’t expanded with the economic freedom. For their part, the rich have kept the youth out of trouble by giving them jobs in their homes and factories.

I’d tell you about the living conditions for the unfortunate—infant mortality rates, deaths caused by curable disease, hunger, homeless rates—but they would seriously undermine the capitalist utopia I’ve painted for you.

Anyway, that’s how Social Darwinism works. Everyone has the same opportunities to succeed regardless of the class into which they were born.

It’s interesting that so many Republicans dismiss Darwin’s theory of what is, yet readily adopt what they think it should be. But hey, that’s America for ya.

Anyone who counted out the influence and power of the National Organization for Marriage should think again. On Tuesday, three state Supreme Court justices in Iowa found themselves out of jobs after voters opted not to send them back to Des Moines for another term. This is the first time in Iowa history that voters have fired justices from the Supreme Court.

And what was their crime? Voting with the unanimous majority in Varnum v. Brien to uphold a lower court’s ruling that the state’s limitation of marriage to only between a man and a woman violated the equal protection clause of the Iowa Constitution. This ruling instituted marriage equality in Iowa in 2009, making the state one of only five states in the nation (plus the District of Columbia) that allow for full marriage rights for all couples. As reported in the New York Times, this vote was intended to send a message nationwide:

Leaders of the recall campaign said the results should be a warning to judges elsewhere.

“I think it will send a message across the country that the power resides with the people,” said Bob Vander Plaats, an unsuccessful Republican candidate for governor who led the campaign. “It’s we the people, not we the courts.”

The campaign to remove the three justices at the ballot box was heavily supported by the National Organization for Marriage and the American Family Association. The Des Moines Register reports that over $650,000 from these and other groups was spent on the campaign to remove the three justices.

As for the justices themselves, they saw something nefarious afoot. From the Times:

The judges declined requests for interviews but released a statement that decried what they called “an unprecedented attack by out-of-state special interest groups.” The statement defended the system for selecting judges but offered what a veiled warning about populist impulses to remake the judiciary: “Ultimately, however, the preservation of our state’s fair and impartial courts will require more than the integrity and fortitude of individual judges, it will require the steadfast support of the people.”

Judicial retention elections are meant to serve as a democratic stamp of approval on the work of judges. For example, in Iowa the justices do not run contested campaigns; voters are merely asked on election day if they approve of retaining the justices in question, and more than fifty percent must vote yes for the judge to be retained. Justices usually do not campaign to retain their own seats, and receiving less than half the vote is rare. By the very nature of the judicial system, justices are likely to rule on controversial issues; with retention elections there is a great deal of risk that the work of the justices will be politicized. This fear was expressed by Joseph R. Grodin, a law professor and former California Supreme Court justice who was voted out in 1986 after a campaign asserting that he was soft on the death penalty. He told the New York Times:

Obviously it has an impact on the independence of judges and how they think of their role — I think that’s demonstrable…But more than that…I think the damage is not on judges, but that courts will come to be seen and judges will come to be seen as simply legislators with robes.

And if you look at the National Organization for Marriage’s victory statement about the Iowa elections, released yesterday, it is clear that they do desire to politicize the work of the bench. From the statement:

“The victories we have achieved this election are truly historic and stunning,” said Brian Brown, president of the National Organization for Marriage (NOM). “First and foremost, we wanted to defeat the judges in Iowa who had usurped the will of the people and imposed gay marriage in that state. The three judges were overwhelmingly rejected, sending a powerful message to any judge who thinks they can impose gay marriage by judicial fiat against the wishes of the people. We thank Iowa for Freedom, the American Family Association, and the Campaign for Working Families for working together to hold these judges accountable.”

If Iowa judges are limited to making rulings that are only supported by the majority of Iowans, then obviously the power of the judiciary in Iowa to defend the State Constitution would be completely neutralized. Why bother having a judicial branch with the power of examining constitutional questions at all? Of course, I strongly suspect that the language of direct democracy is merely what the NOM finds convenient in making its argument against marriage equality. As the struggle to defend marriage equality continues, arguments against it will evolve, especially in light of the fact that support for marriage equality continues to increase across the United States.

In the meantime, expelling the justices from Des Moines does not change the fact that marriage equality remains in effect in Iowa. But it could send a chilling national message that the Religious Right will pour resources into campaigns around the nation opposing other justices who make rulings perceived to be too friendly to LGBT rights, therefore staying the gavel of justices who want to side with, well, justice. This is the most pernicious effect of Tuesday’s judicial retention election in Iowa, and it could have national consequences. But the lesson is learned: in future elections of this nature, outside organizations on the side of marriage equality will have to get down in the mud a little bit too, spend some money, and work to defend the judges who rule in favor of equal rights under the law for all.

In the nick of time, America’s second most famous mad pastor decided to cancel his plans to hold a public burning of the Quran, the holy book of Islam, as a twisted commemoration of the ninth anniversary of the September 11 terror attacks. But will his cancellation hold? Says the New York Times:

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — First, Terry Jones, the Florida pastor who set the world on edge with plans to burn copies of the Koran on Sept. 11, said Thursday that he had canceled his demonstration because he had won a promise to move the proposed Islamic center near ground zero to a new location.

Then, hours later, after learning that the project’s leaders in New York had said that no such deal existed, Mr. Jones backed away from his promise and said the bonfire of sacred texts was simply “suspended.”

It seems that Pastor Jones may be misrepresenting the circumstances of how the event came to be canceled in order to, as the Times characterizes it, save face. Or maybe he is just confused. In any case, Imam Abdul Rauf, one of the principal leaders of the Cordoba House Park51 project in New York City, said that no such deal has been brokered or even discussed.

Regardless of whether Pastor Jones is a liar or just mistaken, one thing that is clear is that Secretary of Defense Robert Gates made a phone call to him yesterday afternoon to ask him to cancel the event in the interest of national security. Indeed, this echoes public statements made by General Petraeus and President Obama, both of whom had spoken out against the burning. As CBS News quotes the president at a press conference today:

“We’ve got an obligation to send a very clear message this kind of behavior or threats of action put our young men and women in harm’s way…

Mr. Obama also said today that he wants to “make sure we don’t start having a bunch of folks across the country think this is a way to get attention.”

He continued, “This is a way of endangering our troops… who are sacrificing for us to keep us safe. You don’t play games with that.”

In light of the fact that the actions of Pastor Jones were inevitably going to reflect poorly on our entire nation, especially in the eyes of many people in the Muslim world, it’s not unreasonable that President Obama spoke out on this. He is free to attempt to persuade Americans to do the right thing, even if the Constitution strictly forbids governmental interference in a clear case of the exercise of free speech. (As a spokesperson for the ACLU told CBS news, in reference to the potential danger to the troops and US interests abroad, “you can’t censor speech based on hypothetical outcome.”) Therefore, I don’t agree with P.Z. Myers when he called President Obama a “damned fool” for weighing in on the controversy. Had the president not said anything, then many people around the world may have taken his silence as apathy or even consent to the idea that the U.S. is in fact at war with the entire religion of Islam and endorses this display of hatred against the religion.

But I surely couldn’t disagree with Myers when he said this:

[T]o suggest that some guy burning a book in a remote land will incite more anti-American sentiment is absurd. We’ve got drones buzzing over Iraq and Afghanistan killing people with a push of a button; we’ve got an armed force occupying those countries; we have bombed their infrastructure into rubble. We’ve killed hundreds of thousands of Muslims. And now we’re to believe that their love of the West will be suddenly devastated by a video of paper burning on youtube? Get a grip, man.

This is an important piece of context that is left out of so much of the news reporting on the Florida book burning: in the event of angry and violent protests against the burning, U.S. soldiers would physically be in harm’s way precisely because, as Myers pointed out, we invaded and continue to occupy those countries. That’s why the soldiers are there. And that might have a little more to do with anti-American sentiment encountered in many countries with predominantly Muslim populations.

I certainly don’t want a single soldier to be harmed in any way by people angered by the images of burning Qurans in Florida. But freedom of speech does not have a national security exception, and frankly, I find the idea that Secretary Gates personally called Pastor Jones to ask him not to hold the event a little, as Glenn Greenwald said in his astute piece at Salon today, “creepy.” Greenwald wrote:

I find the reflexive, intense condemnation of speech on the ground that it will “harm the troops” to be quite creepy and dangerous… This “endanger-the-Troops” theme has been used to justify everything from demonizing war opposition as vaguely Treasonous to re-writing FOIA to suppress torture photos… What actually endangers the Troops by spawning anti-American hatred is what Ted Koppel described: sending them to invade other countries, dropping bombs on civilians with robots from the sky, imprisoning the invaded populations without due process and torturing them, etc. etc. Those who claim to be so concerned by the welfare of Our Troops would be well advised to oppose those policies rather than demanding that American citizens refrain from expressing their views on U.S. soil. Burning Korans is a repellent thing to do because of how bigoted and hateful it is, not because it harms our war efforts.

That final point is key when discussing why this event should be opposed. It’s a bigoted and hateful act, obviously designed to sow anti-Muslim attitudes. In a time when we should be promoting peace and mutual respect, when we should be celebrating global diversity and working towards creating a cooperative future, publicly burning books that well over a billion people hold as sacred does nothing to advance these goals. It’s a deliberate attempt to spit in the face of people who have done nothing wrong. It’s a deliberate attack on beliefs that they hold very dearly. While no governmental entity can Constitutionally prevent this act from taking place (although the local fire department, which denied the church’s request for a burn permit, could possibly levy a fine if the burning were to proceed), the rest of us should use our freedom of speech to speak out against the burning and show the rest of the world that the United States is not a country that brooks bigotry.

Even if Pastor Jones has backed down (for now), this has still been a wake-up call for America to remember that bigotry continues to thrive here, and we must do whatever we can to counteract it. By ripping the mask off of the ugly anti-Muslim sentiment that still lurks and lurches in many corners, you might even say that Pastor Jones did us a favor (of course, this isn’t the only recent controversy that has illuminated widespread anti-Muslim sentiments around America). The onus is on the rest of us to show a different face for our country to people around the world. We can’t let the Pastor Joneses among us define us as a country.

Update: Yesterday CFI issued an updated statement affirming support for religious freedom and stating “CFI’s unequivocal support for the legal right of Muslims to place a community center near Ground Zero does not imply that CFI views the new center as an event to be celebrated…On balance, CFI does not consider houses of worship to be beneficial to humanity, whether they are built at Ground Zero or elsewhere. ” However, the statement makes it clear that CFI believes that there should be no prohibition against building the Cordoba House or any other religious building closer to Ground Zero, and it no longer features the language of the previous statement suggesting that it would be better if the vicinity of Ground Zero was a faith-free zone.

The original post follows:

Should lower Manhatan be a faith-free zone?

The Center For Inquiry thinks so. In a statement released today, the Center for Inquiry (CFI) affirmed its support for freedom of religion but nevertheless called for a moratorium on new faith-based institutional buildings to be constructed in the vicinity of Ground Zero:

The Center for Inquiry is troubled by the rhetoric of some of those protesting the proposed Islamic religious center and mosque near Ground Zero, and it especially deplores the growing politicization of the dispute. CFI also holds that the focus of the protests is too narrow; it would be inappropriate to build any new house of worship in the area immediately around Ground Zero, not just mosques. “The 9/11 attacks were an example of faith-based terrorism, and any institution that privileges faith above reason is an affront to those who were killed and injured in those attacks,” observes Ronald A. Lindsay, president and CEO of CFI.

I suppose that CFI thinks that this is a nuanced position on this contentious issue, but let’s get one thing straight: this is an issue that leaves little room for nuance. You either support free exercise for all religions, or you don’t. It is true that CFI affirms multiple times in the statement that they support the First Amendment and see no legitimate legal mechanism for preventing the construction of the so-called Ground Zero Mosque (actually, it’s an Islamic community center that will be two blocks away from Ground Zero), but it is still utter nonsense to declare that the area close to where the World Trade Center towers once stood should be somehow sacred or should be some kind of faith-free zone.

First, let’s make it clear that this statement is still singling out Islam above all other religions. How can that be? After all, they do state that no new religious buildings should be constructed around Ground Zero, not just Islamic religious buildings. But this is a moot point, because the only project under consideration right now, and the only one that is at the center of a contentious national debate, is the Cordoba House. Period. Therefore, any discussion of any other religion is a red herring. Sure, we could all agree that, as long as we’re opposing the Cordoba House, then we’re also opposing building a Mormon temple, or a house of Scientology, or even a Catholic Church. But all of that is meaningless, because right now no one is proposing to build any of those houses of worship close to Ground Zero. So let’s leave aside the idea that CFI’s statement is doing anything different than singling out Islam, which is what all the other organizations who oppose the project (organizations whose rhetoric CFI finds troubling) are doing.

But to the extent that CFI does try to make all of religion their target in this statement, it is unreasonable to portray all people of faith as kindred spirits to the 19 fanatics who attacked the United States and murdered thousands of people on September 11, 2001. One of the most common talking points against the Cordoba House project is that all Muslims bear some sort of special responsibility for the actions of the few murderous fanatics who claimed to commit their crimes in the name if Islam; while CFI seems to condemn painting Muslims with such a broad brush, nevertheless by condemning the construction of any house of worship in the vicinity of Ground Zero, they seem to only be making the brush even wider by pointing the finger at all people of faith. The vast majority of believers in this world hold no truck with fanatics who would use murder to advance their cause. Why should they all be punished by a sudden declaration of “no-faith zone” for lower Manhattan?

Frankly, the idea of banning all religious construction around Ground Zero doesn’t even make sense. The Cordoba House is proposed for the site of an old Burlington Coat Factory two blocks from Ground Zero. How wide, exactly, would CFI like the no-faith zone to be? How many blocks are enough to show sufficient deference to the families of the victims of 9/11, many of whom are people of faith themselves? Do we condemn them too if they make faith a part of their lives, because faith may have played a part in motivating the 9/11 hijackers? Where does this end?

Religious freedom, like any freedom, is not absolute, but neither can it be restrained in mere symbolic gestures. Declaring lower Manhattan to be some sort of faith-free zone is a non sequitur; if people of faith aren’t collectively responsibile for 9/11, why should they bear responsibility for keeping their religious institutions away from Ground Zero? And if we are meant to believe that all people of faith indeed do have a collective responsibility for the actions of terrorists, then how can we even have a meaningful discussion on religious fanaticism? How can we address the problems caused by religion without making a distinction between most people of faith and the people who are actually causing the problems? We’d be redefining the enemy to be bigger and bigger.

We live in a world of religious people and non-religious people. By all means let those of us who stand outside of organized religion make criticisms and work to counter its harmful influence when necessary. Let us advocate for our own different visions for the future of the world. But to do this most effectively we need to employ the scalpel more and the hatchet less. The 19 people (and the many more who supported them) who attacked the United States on 9/11 received a lot of their motivation from hatred and religious ideology, but they were not acting on behalf of all Muslims, and they certainly were not representing all people of faith in their actions. Making lower Manhattan into some kind of faith-free zone would be an affront to religious liberty and would make no sense in the face of the challenges that we do face today regarding religious extremism.

As a secular humanist, I dispute that ground can be declared sacred, and lower Manhattan is no exception. Cordoba House should be built right where its sponsors have the legal right to build it.

Yesterday both opponents and supporters of the Park51 Islamic community center project in lower Manhattan gathered for competing rallies. The New York Times was there and reported on some ugliness that took place:

Around noon on Sunday, Michael Rose, a medical student from Brooklyn, approached some of the hundreds of protesters who had gathered near ground zero to rally against a mosque and Islamic center planned for the neighborhood.

Mr. Rose, 27, carried a handwritten sign in favor of the mosque — “Religious tolerance is what makes America great,” it read — and his presence caused a stir. An argument broke out, punctuated by angry fingers pointed in the student’s face.

The police eventually removed Mr. Rose for his own safety.

Salon.com commentator Glenn Greenwald points to a video of another confrontation that took place at the same anti-Park51 rally. An African-American man wearing a cap that fit tightly over his head walked through, and members of the crowd quickly decided that he must be a Muslim and started shouting anti-Islamic slogans at him. If you watch the video at YouTube (warning: strong language, poor sound quality), you can see the hostile tone of the demonstration. The man who is singled out seems to be simultaneously angry and baffled. For what it’s worth, he denies he’s even a Muslim, but also expresses bewilderment that the crowd singled him out without knowing his opinion on the subject. But his very presence activates the deep hostility of the crowd in a way that looks downright frightening in the video.

In light of all this ugliness, it disappoints me to see that Mother Jones is reporting this morning that several commissioners from the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom have come out strongly against the Park51 project. The USCIRF is federally funded and was created by Congress in 1998 to monitor religious freedom around the world and advise the president on the issue. But apparently many of its commissioners lose sight of this mission when it comes to addressing religious freedom at home. According to the Mother Jones report:

In a recent piece for National Review Online, Nina Shea, one of USCIRF’s nine commissioners (who are selected by the president and congressional leaders), wrote that instead of “a cultural center for all New Yorkers,” the “mosque” project could be “a potential tool for Islamists”—suggesting it would be a hotbed of jihadism that, among other things, spreads the literature and ideas of Islamic extremism. She compared the leaders of the Cordoba House project to convicted terrorist Omar Abdel Rahman (the “blind Sheikh”) and accused Fort Hood and Christmas Day bombing coordinator Anwar al-Awlaki. (Shea’s piece, as of Monday, was no longer showing up on the NRO site.)

Mother Jones goes on to point out that at least two of the other eight commissioners also have spoken out against the project, including Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, who compared the project to a hypothetical Shinto Shrine at Pearl Harbor and believes it should be moved several more blocks away from Ground Zero.

Never mind that Imam Rauf, the religious leader behind the project, indubitably holds moderate religious and political views. Never mind that the First Amendment to the Constitution is not conditional based on which religion is asking for free exercise. Never mind that one of the lead opponents to Park51 has unabashedly and repeatedly lied about the project. Nina Shea and Richard Land are here to tell you that religious freedom doesn’t exist in lower Manhattan…or that it shouldn’t.

But while many opponents of the Park51 project claim it’s a matter of the land around Ground Zero being somehow sacred, it is nevertheless evident that—as one of the project backers, Daisy Khan, stated yesterday—the opposition has to do with hatred of Muslims more than anything else. As the Washington Post reported today, Mosque construction is facing tough opposition all over the nation, including in Murfreesboro, TN, where opponents to a local Islamic center’s expansion plans carried signs that said “Keep Tennessee Terror Free.”

It is the height of bigotry to blame an entire population for the actions of a few. Mosque opponents are acting as though Islam itself (and therefore all Muslims) attacked America on 9/11, rather than a small band of violent and hateful fanatics. When they say that building the Park51 project is “insensitive” to the 9/11 victim’s families, they are acting as though the very existence of Muslims is what’s offensive.

The conflict over Park51 points to a larger battle over our country’s future. Will the USA be a nation that respects the First Amendment, that is tolerant (and even accepting) of religious minorities, that truly practices the ideal that people should be free to practice their respective religions without interference? Or will xenophobia triumph, fanned by the flames of polarizing political and media figures, leaving the nation as a sort of exclusive zone for the one chosen Christian religion?

It’s a battle we cannot afford to lose. The Park51 project must be allowed to proceed, unhindered. Now is the time for concerned citizens to speak out in favor of the universal principle of religious freedom, which benefits all of us, no matter how we may individually feel about different organized religions. Or will secular humanists one day be saying our own version of Pastor Niemöller’s famous statement? They came first for the Muslims…

Two candidates for “Man Bites Dog” headline of the year surfaced last week.

“Town Protects Tavern from Church.” No, this is not a typo. In Hampshire, Illinois, just west of Chicago, the Faithway Baptist Church sought permission from the village board to open a youth center. Normally, that would be a no-brainer, but in this case the youth center would have been across the street from The Kave, a comfortable neighborhood watering hole offering karaoke, shufflebowl, and Cubs baseball. Illinois law prohibits issuing a liquor license to any establishment operating within 100 feet of a church. Although it doesn’t prohibit a church from opening near a tavern, the village board realized that if The Kave were to change ownership in the future, it would be unlawful to grant the new owner a license, so The Kave would be gone. In a stunning display of common sense, the Board decided that would be unfair, and told Faithway Baptist to look elsewhere.

That decision probably violated federal law, as we’ll see in a minute. But first the other headline: “Strippers Protest Church.” The Foxhole is a business establishment in Warsaw, Ohio, offering entertainment a little edgier than karaoke and shufflebowl. For the past four years, though, Pastor Bill Dunfee of the New Beginnings Ministries Church – which is not across the street, but four miles away – has led a campaign of harassment against The Foxhole, its employees, and its customers. Dunfee and his congregation would show up outside The Foxhole, sometimes with bullhorns, snapping photos of customers and their license plates to violate their privacy online, and berating them for being evil as they entered and left the premises. Dunfee has also been pursuing legal remedies, including zoning laws, to throw The Foxhole employees out of work. “You can’t share territory with the Devil” growls Pastor Dunfee, who says he is intent on glorifying Jesus. Read the rest of this entry &raquo