When America's founders ratified the Constitution, they created something that arguably had never existed in the world before: a republic where freedom of religion was explicitly enshrined in the charter, where toleration wasn't just the whim of a benevolent ruler but the immutable law of the land. As George Washington wrote in his famous letter to the Jewish congregation of Newport:

It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights. For happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.

This was a radical break with history. At the time America was founded, all the great powers of Europe had state-supported churches and monarchs who claimed to rule by divine right, and religious wars and persecution were the order of the day: Catholics persecuting Protestants, Protestants persecuting Catholics, and both Catholics and Protestants persecuting those within their own sects who strayed from established dogma. In fact, the Spanish Inquisition was still executing heretics at the time of Thomas Jefferson's presidency.

In Great Britain during the Elizabethan era, the houses of prominent Roman Catholic families were known for having secret rooms, called "priest holes" (see also), where Catholic priests could be hidden away at a moment's notice when inquisitors came calling. Can you imagine what living in that society must have been like? Can you imagine living in a country where your freedom of belief hung by a thread, where the whim of a king made the difference between being grudgingly tolerated and an enemy of the state, and where literally at any moment you might have to abandon everything and go into hiding for your life - and that this happened so often that people planned for it?

Although America has seen (and practiced) its share of religious persecution, we've never had horrors like these. Instead, our founding document offered all comers a wonderful bargain: the freedom to live in peace, practice your beliefs as you see fit, even preach them to others. And in return we asked only, as President Washington said, that believers of all kinds be good citizens and obey the law of the land. We modern Americans have gotten used to this freedom, but that shouldn't blind us to how truly unprecedented it was, nor how liberal and generous it is to theists of every denomination.

But for members of the modern Christian right, it isn't enough. It's not enough for them that they have the right to practice their beliefs as they see fit, free of government interference. It's not enough for them that they have the unlimited freedom to fundraise, pray and preach as much as they like, in whatever media outlets they choose to publish. It's not even enough for them that they can stud the landscape with churches and staff and maintain them tax-free.

No, these dominionist believers want more than freedom: they want a special, privileged place in the laws of our country. They want the government to obey them, to issue official proclamations reminding everyone of their superiority, and to underwrite their evangelism with tax money from nonbelievers. They want their dogmas and only their dogmas to be taught in public school science classes, enshrined on courthouse lawns, and used as the basis to decide who should be allowed to marry, divorce, be born and die. In short, they want to be what our founders specifically sought to prevent: a state-established church, an arm of the government, with special rights and privileges granted to members and nonbelievers relegated to second-class citizens.

What selfishness! What ingratitude! All American believers, Christian or not, were given a priceless gift by the founders, and these ones throw it on the ground and spit on it. They don't want to be one religion among many; they want special privileges and special recognition. They think that freedom is worthless if it's granted to people they dislike - like a spoiled child who wants a toy because no one in his class has it, and then throws a temper tantrum when other kids get them because he's not the only one anymore. It's telling that these fundamentalists apparently can't just practice their religion on their own - they need constant hand-holding and head-patting from the government to stroke their egos and reassure them that they're better and specialer than everyone else. It's a clear sign of insecurity.

Benjamin Franklin had their number over two hundred years ago:

When a religion is good, I conceive it will support itself; and when it does not support itself, and God does not take care to support it so that its professors are obliged to call for help of the civil power, 'tis a sign, I apprehend, of its being a bad one.

Think of this the next time some obnoxious theocrat is on the news, arguing that it's unfair to him if his sect doesn't get special rights. These people want us to think of them as proud, pious defenders of America's Christian heritage (a claim which is, needless to say, utterly false). Instead, we should think of them as spoiled and petulant children, ungratefully rejecting the pledges of liberty that our founding generation purchased in blood, all because they want to be treated as if they were better than everyone else. Keep that image in your head, and it may help you put the theocrats' demands in their proper context.

• Despite the good sense shown by the British Medical Association in lambasting homeopathy at their annual conference last month, the UK National Health Service has announced that it will still pay for water and sugar pills passed off as medicine.

• A court in Utah has thrown out the rape conviction of Mormon cult leader Warren Jeffs, due to a legal technicality, and ordered that the case be retried. Texas is still seeking to have him extradited to face similar charges, so it seems likely that he'll ultimately face justice.

• I was shocked to read of some ultra-Orthodox Israeli communities that are so extreme, they demand that their women wear burqas so as not to arouse the passions of men.

• A Liberty University graduate defends the separation of church and state.

• In more welcome news, the U.K. education secretary has said he's interested in proposals for atheist schools, after Richard Dawkins made such a proposal in response to a law allowing faith-based and community groups to open their own publicly funded schools. And why not? If every church in England has its own schools - the article mentions Anglican, Catholic, Jewish, Muslim, Sikh and Hindu - why shouldn't there be atheist schools that teach students rationality and critical thinking?

Despite the ongoing schism of the Anglican church, which I wrote about in my last post, I'm happy to see that there's still plenty of good sense and reason in the U.K. One outstanding example is this story from last month, where the British Medical Association voted to stop funding homeopathy in public hospitals. (UK readers, do you know if is this a binding vote or just advisory?) There's been some trenchant commentary on the decision, like this column from Ed West:

The most outspoken supporter of the motion, Dr Tom Dolphin, had earlier compared homeopathy to witchcraft, but then apologised to witches on the grounds that this was unfair. Homeopathy, he said, was "pernicious nonsense that feeds into a rising wave of irrationality which threatens to overwhelm the hard-won gains of the Enlightenment and the scientific method".

And from Martin Robbins, responding to a supporter of homeopathy:

Apparently 'thousands' of people - including Peter Hain's son - get better after taking homeopathy. This is absolutely true, but the problem is that most people get better anyway, whether you give them antibiotics, homeopathy, or a slap to the face. Humans tend to be quite good at healing themselves. Once you control for this sort of variable, the outcomes are much clearer.... the more rigorously we test homeopathy, the more it fails.

By way of response, defenders of homeopathy are reduced to reading from a by-now-familiar script:

Apparently... I'm displaying what Dr Le Fanu describes as "Dawkinsite arrogance", but there's nothing arrogant about researchers collectively testing ideas and accepting the results. What's arrogant is to ignore evidence when it doesn't produce the result you expect. Particularly when that evidence has been accumulating for two centuries – a period of time in which homeopaths apparently haven't even managed to agree on how much you have to shake the vial.

Yes, that's right - in two hundred years, homeopaths haven't gotten around to figuring out how many times a homeopathic remedy has to be "succussed" (i.e., shaken) in the course of dilution to activate its supposed curative powers. Do you really want to take medicine from people who can't be bothered to perform even the most basic tests on their own ideas? And what does it say about the homeopaths' level of devotion to scientific rigor that they've never even tried to determine this?

And this isn't the only good news out of England. It seems that Colin Hall, the recently elected mayor of Leicester, is a nonbeliever, and he's taken some commendable steps toward ending Christian privilege in his town:

Writing in this month's edition of the Leicester Secularist, the journal of the city's Secular Society, Cllr Hall, who will serve as Lord Mayor for the 2010-11 municipal year, said: "Contrary to the myths that certain organisations like to promote, the practice of observing prayers at the start of council meetings is a relatively recent one.

"I am delighted to confirm that I will be exercising my discretion as Lord Mayor to abolish the outdated, unnecessary and intrusive practice.

"I personally consider that religion, in whatever shape or form, has no role to play at all in the conduct of council business... This particularly applies in Leicester, where the majority of council members, myself included, do not regularly attend any particular faith service."

Although Hall's decision appears to have gone over smoothly with the majority, there was some predictable squawking from pushy Christians who are unhappy that their special rights are being taken away:

A Fellowship Pastor, Ian Jones, said: "I find it deeply sad that anyone would want to suppress the rights of others to pray.

"If someone has a problem with this practice, could they not simply join the meeting once it is over?"

Although the U.K. as a whole is friendly to reason, it seems its pastors suffer from the same disease that's endemic in America - the belief that they have the right to force their religion on others and that their free speech is being suppressed if they're denied this. I have a better idea, Pastor Jones: why don't you do your own praying before the meeting if you want to, and spare everyone else the wasted time of listening to your superstitious mumbling?

This isn't Mayor Hall's first action standing up for the rights of nonbelievers. He's hired the president of the local secular society to serve as the town's chaplain. When he took office, he also refused to take part in a service at Leicester Cathedral to ceremonially welcome him into his new role. As he wrote on Twitter, "Bear in mind though, I am Lord Mayor for all people of Leicester and not just those from the Church of England."

Hall's decision to stand up for secularism and conduct the people's business without giving special privileges to religion is a wonderful breath of fresh air, and something I wish we'd see more of in America. And for truth's sake, the U.K.'s current deputy prime minister, Nick Clegg, is an atheist! You British people are just out to make us look bad, aren't you?

I wrote in 2007 about the National Day of Prayer, a ridiculous ceremony created by Congress in the 1950s to urge all Americans to pray. That obviously unconstitutional objective would be bad enough, but what makes it even worse is that official National Day of Prayer events, held in city halls and government offices across the nation, are overrun by evangelical religious-right groups who claim the day as their own and don't allow members of the "wrong" religions to participate.

Well, I'm thrilled to say that freethinkers and secularists have won a tremendous victory against this blatantly illegal government-sponsored religious exercise. The Freedom from Religion Foundation has won summary judgment in a district court over their lawsuit, filed in October 2008, which seeks to bar the federal government from recognizing the National Day of Prayer.

Judge Barbara Crabb wrote a 66-page decision that lays out the history of the National Day of Prayer, exhaustively considers the precedents, and makes a clear, thorough and compelling argument for why this event is a complete violation of the constraints placed on the government by the First Amendment. The ruling is available online, and I'll quote a few of the choicer parts:

However, recognizing the importance of prayer to many people does not mean that the government may enact a statute in support of it, any more than the government may encourage citizens to fast during the month of Ramadan, attend a synagogue, purify themselves in a sweat lodge or practice rune magic. [p.4-5]

[R]eligious expression by the government that is inspirational and comforting to a believer may seem exclusionary or even threatening to someone who does not share those beliefs. This is not simply a matter of being "too sensitive" or wanting to suppress the religious expression of others. Rather, as explained in a recent book by the Provost of Princeton University and the Dean of the University of Texas School of Law, it is a consequence of the unique danger that religious conduct by the government poses for creating "in" groups and "out" groups.... [p.19]

If the government were interested only in acknowledging the role of religion in America, it could have designated a
"National Day of Religious Freedom" rather than promote a particular religious practice. [p.34]

The same law that prohibits the government from declaring a National Day of Prayer also prohibits it from declaring a National Day of Blasphemy. [p.64]

The opinion also takes a few well-deserved swipes at the excuses that some judges have devised to sneak state-sponsored religion in through the back door:

Establishment clause values would be significantly eroded if the government could promote any longstanding religious practice of the majority under the guise of "acknowledgment." [p.33]

and especially:

One judge [that would be Judge Reinhardt, who ruled for Michael Newdow in the Pledge case —Ebonmuse] observed recently that ceremonial deism is a "hazily defined" concept and suggested that it "represents mainly the judiciary's less than courageous response" to certain longstanding religious practices. [p.44]

Crabb's decision explained something I didn't know - that the National Day of Prayer was proposed by conservative congressmen (including Absalom Robertson, Pat Robertson's father) to an evangelistic revival held in Washington, D.C. by Billy Graham which called upon the government to be more Christian. She quotes from Graham's speech to show how openly partisan and sectarian his intent was:

We have dropped our pilot, the Lord Jesus Christ, and are sailing blindly on without divine chart or compass, hoping somehow to find our desired haven. We have certain leaders who are rank materialists; they do not recognize God nor care for Him [sic]... Ladies and gentlemen, I warn you, if this state of affairs continues, the end of the course is national shipwreck and ruin. [p.6]

Graham, of course, is a private citizen and is welcome to hold the opinion that our leaders should be Jesus believers or engage in prayer - but it is not the role of the government itself to back him up. It is not the role of the government to tell people to "recognize" or "care for" one particular set of god-beliefs, nor is it any of the government's business to tell us how, when, or whether to pray. Thomas Jefferson explained why when he wisely refused to issue religious proclamations as President:

I do not believe it is for the interest of religion to invite the civil magistrate to direct its exercises, its discipline, or its doctrines; nor of the religious societies that the general government should be invested with the power of effecting any uniformity of time or matter among them. Fasting and prayer are religious exercises. The enjoining them, an act of discipline. Every religious society has a right to determine for itself the times for these exercises, and the objects proper for them, according to their own particular tenets; and this right can never be safer than in their own hands where the Constitution has deposited it... every one must act according to the dictates of his own reason, and mine tells me that civil powers alone have been given to the President of the United States, and no authority to direct the religious exercises of his constituents.

This is just the first step, of course; this ruling is all but certain to go to an appeals court. Even if it survives the first round of appeals, it's very likely to wind up before the Supreme Court, and there's no telling how they'll rule. Nevertheless, this is a major victory, and the Freedom from Religion Foundation deserves tremendous credit for taking on this case and fighting it out in court. If you're an atheist and you're not an FFRF member, why on earth aren't you?

I just finished reading Half the Sky, Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn's book on what we can do to improve the status of women worldwide. One of the book's major arguments is that, despite their opposition to abortion and contraception, religious groups often do more good than secular liberals give them credit for:

Religious conservatives... have also saved lives in vast numbers by underwriting and operating clinics in some of the neediest parts of Africa and Asia. When you travel in the poorest countries in Africa... the people you almost inevitably encounter are the missionary doctors and church-sponsored aid workers. [p.142]

Kristof and WuDunn write that both religious and secular groups do important work, and that liberals, moderates and conservatives from across the political spectrum should be able to cooperate to accomplish more. I agree! And so does Saad Mohammed Ali, a U.S. resident and former Iraqi refugee who's fluent in English and Arabic. He applied for a caseworker position at World Relief, the humanitarian arm of the National Association of Evangelicals, for a job that involved helping Iraqi refugees resettle in America. On the face of it, he seemed ideally suited. And World Relief would have thought so too - except, it turns out, for one small, insignificant detail (HT: The Wall of Separation):

...a few days after he applied for the position last December, [Ali] got an unexpected call from the same manager at World Relief: She was sorry, she told him, but the agency couldn't offer him the job because he is not Christian.

Saad Mohammed Ali, you see, is a Muslim. And no matter how well qualified a Muslim might be to help the people World Relief wants to help, World Relief doesn't hire Muslims. It only hires evangelical Christians.

The opponents of atheism often accuse us of believing that no religion has ever done any good for anyone - a position that's obviously absurd and is held by no atheist that I know of. (Even Christopher Hitchens, atheist firebrand extraordinaire, says only that there's no good which a religious person could do but an atheist couldn't do.) The argument that atheists actually make is twofold. First, we assert that churches and religious groups' charitable work comes from the universal human sense of compassion, not from any specifically religious teaching. (This is most clearly shown by the fact that every religion, regardless of its beliefs, does work like this. Even Hamas builds schools, hospitals and orphanages.) Second, we assert that in spite of this, the religious beliefs of those groups often hamper their efforts by causing them to accomplish less good than they otherwise could have - even worsening the very problems they're trying to solve.

The clearest example is Roman Catholicism: the church does social work that helps the poor and AIDS victims in Africa and Asia, but by their hard-line opposition to condoms, they're making the problem worse by ensuring that there will be more poor people and more AIDS sufferers. A similar case is that of abstinence-only sex education. I don't doubt that the Christian evangelicals who support these programs genuinely want to reduce teen pregnancy and STDs. The problem is that their approach has been shown to be not nearly as effective as comprehensive programs that teach about contraception.

So too with World Relief. The problem isn't that they do no good at all, but that they artificially and arbitrarily limit the good they do by turning away perfectly qualified candidates just because they don't hold the right beliefs. And because atheism, as a movement, is relatively new and unorganized, we don't yet have the infrastructure to offer an alternative path to people who are rejected by religious charities that refuse to hire nonbelievers.

The major churches have been been running social programs for decades, have local branches all over the world, and have support from governments and wealthy, well-connected donors. They have a head start on us. We're working to organize and to catch up, but this takes time - and since they won't work with us or hire us in the meantime, it's more difficult to get our own efforts off the ground. This makes any straightforward comparison, of the "atheists don't do as much charitable work as religious people" sort, misguided and ignorant. (Another thought: How many current employees of World Relief are not evangelicals, but are afraid to disclose their beliefs lest they lose their jobs?)

One more point to highlight: according to AU, World Relief gets up to seventy percent of its funding from the U.S. government. That's your tax dollars and mine, American readers, going to underwrite jobs that we can never be hired for because we don't believe the right dogmas. This glaring constitutional violation would be excellent grounds for a lawsuit, if the right-leaning Supreme Court hadn't slammed the door in our faces by ruling that, due to legal technicalities about who exactly is spending the money, freethinkers have no power to compel the government to respect the First Amendment. We're at a double disadvantage: the government can take our money, use it to fund prejudiced, proselytizing religious charities without our consent, and then to cap it off, arrogant religious apologists demand to know why we aren't accomplishing as much good as those charities!

With the historic passage of sweeping health insurance reform, Americans have reason to rejoice this week. For the first time, and despite hysterical opposition from the party of conspiracy nuts and theocrats, our government has enshrined in law the idea that every citizen has a right to affordable health care. Even if the law is far from perfect, it's still a huge advance over the alternative of doing nothing - and history shows that most major pieces of progressive social legislation, including Social Security and Medicare, started out flawed and were improved over time. With this bill now signed into law, we have a foundation to build on.

Atheists and freethinkers have another reason to celebrate (in addition to the removal of the noxious, theocratic Stupak language on abortion). Namely, one of the worst provisions of the bill - a clause mandating that health insurance companies pay for prayer - was removed in committee and didn't make it into the final legislation. This clause was originally inserted at the urging of the Christian Science church, the cult which shuns all modern medicine in favor of faith healing delusions and would rather see children suffer agonizingly and die slowly than take them to a doctor.

Or at least, that used to be the party line. In the last few decades, Christian Scientists' numbers have been in steady decline, and there are signs that the church may be giving ground on its absolute stance, as the New York Times reports:

Though officials do not provide membership statistics, scholars estimate that the church's numbers have dropped to under 100,000 from a peak of about twice that at the turn of the 20th century.... In New York City, falling membership forced the Christian Science church on Park Avenue to lease its building part time to a catering service in 2006. Another Manhattan church remains open; a third closed in 2005.

It'd be easy to snark that the reason Christian Scientists' numbers are dwindling is that so many of them tend to die. But I don't think it's sheer attrition that's the cause. In the past few years, there have been more and more cases of parents prosecuted for letting their children die of completely treatable illnesses. I think it's the onslaught of bad publicity and the church's public intransigence that have been turning people off - not to mention the fact that, as scientific medicine gets better and better and its benefits become more and more apparent, there are increasingly few people willing to give it up.

Like most churches in decline, Christian Scientists have turned to the state to prop them up. The healthcare reform bill was a perfect example, where church lobbyists pleaded with the government to force insurers to pay them for praying. Christian Science practitioners charge $25 to $50 per session, but since their "treatment" of the sick consists of nothing more than babbling superstitious gibberish, anything other than zero is far too high a price to pay. And if every sect or cult under the sun could demand payment in exchange for carrying out their own magic rituals, where would it end? Why should the rest of us have to subsidize, through higher insurance premiums, the religious nonsense of modern-day witch doctors?

The American Academy of Pediatrics deserves commendation for their strong stand against treating prayer as the equivalent of medicine:

"Given the complete lack of scientific evidence of the efficacy of prayer in treating any illness or disorder in children," academy officials wrote Senate leaders in October, "mandating coverage for these services runs counter to the principles of evidence-based medicine."

But, as I said, there are signs that the Christian Scientists have started to relax their absolutist stance - the pronouncements of their lunatic founder, Mary Baker Eddy, notwithstanding. Though Eddy demanded that believers forsake medicine under all circumstances, some modern members are taking a more tolerant stance and starting to push prayer as an alternative, rather than a replacement, for conventional, evidence-based treatment.

The faith's guiding textbook forbids mixing medical care with Christian Science healing, which is a form of transcendental prayer intended to realign a patient's soul with God.... Mary Baker Eddy, who founded the Church of Christ, Scientist, in 1879 in Boston, wrote in the church's textbook, "Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures," that anyone inviting a doctor to his sickbed "invites defeat."

But faced with dwindling membership and blows to their church's reputation... Christian Science leaders have recently found a new tolerance for medical care. For more than a year, leaders say, they have been encouraging members to see a physician if they feel it is necessary.

..."In the last year, I can't tell you how many times I've been called to pray at a patient's bedside in a hospital," said Philip Davis, 59, the church's national spokesman, who has been tending to the sick for three decades as a Christian Science practitioner.

This may end up being one of the very rare cases where a religion is forced to change by the sheer weight of the evidence against it. The Christian Science church is still going through a process of smoothing out the rough edges, and as the benefits of modern medicine become increasingly obvious, their leaders may no longer be able to persuade the rest to forsake it. We may wind up with a situation like modern Roman Catholicism, where the bishops and the Pope continue to preach against contraception, but the official teaching is almost universally ignored among educated followers. And the happy fact that payment for prayer was removed from the health care law - a rare triumph of rationality in Washington - can only speed that outcome.

• It's about time! The SEC has charged a psychic with securities fraud for claiming to be able to supernaturally foretell the direction of the market.

• The staff of IslamOnline, a Cairo-based journalism website that offers a platform for liberal and reformist views, have gone on strike over plans by the Qatari owners to impose stricter editorial controls and force a more conservative viewpoint.

• I'm very glad to report that Ireland's government is now backtracking on the ludicrous blasphemy law it passed several months ago. The government plans to hold a referendum later this year on whether the law should be repealed. Now it's just up to the people of Ireland to do the right thing.

• Less positively, the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has upheld religious language in the Pledge of Allegiance, ruling against a new lawsuit brought by Michael Newdow, and reaching the ridiculous conclusion that "one nation under God" is not religious language. One of the judges who took part in the original decision (which Newdow won before his first case was thrown out by the Supreme Court for lack of standing) wrote a scathing dissent. Newdow plans to ask for an en banc rehearing.

• Also, there's a truly outstanding article by Johann Hari interviewing the Ethiopian women fighting back against bride abduction, the brutal practice of men finding wives by kidnapping and raping them (at which point, in agreement with biblical law, they're expected to marry their rapist - since they've been "ruined" and no other man will have them). In the shadow of a vicious dictatorship, there are heroic women, and men, fighting to change a culture where this is accepted and common.

This month, I want to write about some words important to the atheist movement that are frequently misused and abused by religious apologists. The first of these words is secularism.

In the rhetoric of spokespeople for the religious right, secularism is often assumed to be the desire to ban all forms of religious expression from public view. As is usual in these polemics, this is a falsehood, created by taking a true statement and then twisting and distorting it almost beyond recognition. The polemicists who make this accusation have invented a far more sinister and far-reaching goal that we've never advocated or supported, and assumed, without any evidence, that it must be our secret desire.

To be secular means, simply, to be without religion. But this adjective applies very differently to countries than it does to people. For a person to be secular means that they do not subscribe to the creed of any existing religion (as in "secular humanist"). A secular person, by the usual and conventional meaning of the term, is therefore a nonbeliever, an atheist.

For a state to be secular has a superficially similar meaning: that that state is not ruled by a religious authority, nor are its laws derived from the tenets of a religious creed, nor are its citizens required to give assent to a particular set of religious beliefs. A secular state is one that has no official religion, no favoritism or preference shown by the government for one church over another, or for religious belief in general as opposed to nonbelief.

But this does not mean that a secular state must be one that officially bans the holding of religious beliefs among its citizenry or takes positive steps to disadvantage religion. Just because a state is secular says nothing about the religious affiliations of the people who make up that state. The people themselves may be devout followers of any number of faiths. Even the elected leaders can hold whatever beliefs they like, so long as they make laws based on religiously neutral considerations of public policy, and not on the edicts of any particular sect.

The difference is a crucial one, and partisans of the religious right have effectively stirred up confusion on this point in order to argue that because a secular person has no religion, a secular state must also contain no religion whatsoever. But this is not true. Because people are unified wholes, a secular person has no religious beliefs and that's that. But states and countries are not single entities, but assemblages of large numbers of people who may believe all sorts of different things. The key is that the different beliefs of all these people "average out", so to speak, producing a government that treats them all as equals before the law, regardless of their religious beliefs or lack thereof.

The Army veteran and atheist Ron Garrett put this point succinctly in an essay on Ebon Musings:

Who gets to decide we have to believe in one god, or many gods, or no gods? Under our Constitution, only I get to decide that for me, and you for you, and neither of us gets to use our temporary control of the government to bully others into agreement, or program children in a public school classroom to believe in someone else's gods and prophets against the parent's wishes, or even in accordance with them, because the government can't do that under our law.

The problem arises when the government does not treat all people as equals, but begins to show special favoritism or grant official privileges to certain religious beliefs and not others. This is when advocates of secularism - who may, or may not, be secular people themselves - step in to demand that the government cease this favoritism and return to its neutral position. And this, inevitably, is when the religious right partisans appear to create confusion. They argue that what we secularists (secretly) want is not neutrality of government towards religion, but official support for atheism and positive hostility of government towards religion.

Phrased in this way, the argument is absurd. First of all, as I previously mentioned, many people who support secularism are not secular people themselves: they are religious believers who recognize the value of government remaining neutral toward religious beliefs. (For example, Barry Lynn, the current director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, is an ordained minister in the United Church of Christ.) Second, if that was what secular people wanted, we wouldn't merely be demanding that the government cease its official endorsement of religions we don't belong to; we would be demanding that the government take our side. We would be demanding not that "under God" be stricken from the Pledge of Allegiance, but that it be replaced with "under no God". We wouldn't be asking for an end to official prayer before city council meetings; we'd be asking for an official reading from the books of Richard Dawkins or Robert Ingersoll.

The rampant dissemination of falsehoods about secularism has led to absurd situations where religious fundamentalists and secularists have exactly the same goal, only the former group doesn't realize it. For instance, there have been many cases where a state or township put some intrusive religious monument on public property like a school or a courthouse, was sued by a church-state separation group, and after a protracted and bitter legal fight, finally agreed to move the monument to private land, like a church lawn, in exchange for the dropping of the complaint. Inevitably, religious fundamentalists cheer this outcome as if it represented a victory over those evil secularists, when in fact it's the very thing we were asking for all along.

Private individuals and religious groups can promote their religion to their heart's content, on their own property and with their own money. But the government is supposed to represent all of us, to respect everyone's freedom to believe or not believe as they see fit, and to refrain from any action which sends the message to a particular religious (or atheist) group that they are favored, privileged insiders, or that they are disfavored, rejected outsiders.

And lastly, why do we advocate secularism in government? The answer is that, in the long run, it's better for everyone regardless of what beliefs they hold. Prominent advocates of state secularism, like America's founding fathers, had the lessons of history to draw from, and knew full well that when a state is not secular, when its religious belief is determined by its rulers and competing beliefs are outlawed or persecuted, the inevitable result is bitter, bloody religious war. Europe was convulsed by warfare between Catholics and Protestants for centuries for that very reason. Today we see similar strife between Sunni and Shi'ite Muslims, in countries where the rulers demand allegiance to one or the other of those sects.

One doesn't have to be an atheist to recognize that it's better for everyone when the state doesn't attempt to coerce uniformity among its citizens. Religious belief is and must be a matter of individual conscience, not of coercion imposed by law. That's why secularism in government is good for us all, both for religious people and also for people who are secular themselves.

But I would add that, for individuals, secularism is a good thing as well. Being a secular person means being free from the superstitious and arbitrary impositions of religion, from the chains of senseless dogma and from archaic and irrational rules. Secularism means the freedom to live your life as you see fit, pursuing whatever purpose you choose for yourself, subject only to the limitation that you allow others the same freedom and not interfere with their equal right to set their own course. As Robert Ingersoll put it in his usual poetic style:

Secularism believes in building a home here, in this world. It trusts to individual effort, to energy, to intelligence, to observation and experience rather than to the unknown and the supernatural. It desires to be happy on this side of the grave.

Secularism means food and fireside, roof and raiment, reasonable work and reasonable leisure, the cultivation of the tastes, the acquisition of knowledge, the enjoyment of the arts, and it promises for the human race comfort, independence, intelligence, and above all liberty.

Secularism, in government and in individual life, is something the human race needs more of. We should work to make it so.

I'm happy to report that there's quite a lot of good news this week:

• The U.K. government recommends that primary school religious education classes should teach about "secular beliefs such as humanism and atheism", in addition to learning about major world religions like Christianity, Buddhism and Islam. This is just one more symptom of how far ahead of us our European friends are in some respects - can you imagine the religious right frenzy that would ensue if a U.S. politician recommended teaching about atheism in public high schools?

• In a story that made me especially happy, Andrew Wakefield, the pseudoscientific doctor who's almost single-handedly responsible for the anti-vaccination movement, was found to have seriously abused his trust as a medical practitioner by a U.K. ethics panel. According to the ruling, Wakefield ordered unnecessary and invasive tests on autistic children (including spinal taps and colonoscopies), without securing proper ethical approval, in the paper that claimed a link between the MMR vaccine and autism. He also failed to disclose major conflicts of interest (he was being paid by trial lawyers looking to file claims against vaccine manufacturers). The General Medical Council ruled that Wakefield was "dishonest, irresponsible and showed callous disregard for the distress and pain" of the children, and is still evaluating a charge of professional misconduct that could lead to Wakefield's losing his license to practice medicine.

• And lastly, I'm glad to report that Scott Roeder, the Christian terrorist who shot and killed Dr. George Tiller, was convicted of first-degree murder by a Kansas jury this week. The judge rejected the defense's ludicrous request that the jury be allowed to consider voluntary manslaughter, and they returned the verdict after just 37 minutes of deliberation. Roeder faces a mandatory sentence of life in prison, the most fitting punishment for a cold-blooded and vicious killer like himself.

Although the cause of justice was served, this verdict can't undo the damage; Dr. Tiller's clinic will be closing for good, which means in a way that Roeder got exactly what he wanted. Still, the verdict sends a message that anti-choice zealots cannot commit these crimes with impunity. It may not be enough to discourage future acts of terrorism against abortion providers, but at least we have assurance that the rule of law is still operative in America.

By Sarah Braasch

Representative Bart Stupak from Michigan was paraphrased in a recent New York Times interview as saying that his resolve to defeat the healthcare reform bill, unless the bill includes his anti-abortion amendment language, is a straightforward matter of Roman Catholic faith. The article states that Representative Stupak said that he actually urged the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops to toughen its stance on the legislation. Representative Stupak is also quoted as saying: "It's not the end of the world if it goes down."

What?!?! Let me say that again. WTF?!?!

I don't understand how something like this goes unnoticed and unmentioned.

How does he get a free pass on saying something like that in his capacity as a US Representative? How does he not get called out on that?

He just proclaimed to the press that he holds religious law in higher esteem than the US Constitution. He just stated, unequivocally, that he intends to impose religious law upon the American citizenry. He just asserted that he intends to defeat healthcare reform unless religious law is deemed the supreme law of the land, usurping the position of the US Constitution.

I am trying to imagine the reaction if Representative Keith Ellison from Minnesota were to say something similar. Keith Ellison is the first Muslim member of the US Congress. I am trying to imagine the resulting tumult and uproar if he were to defy his Democratic Party and vote in opposition to its platform, all the while maintaining that he was doing so as a straightforward matter of his Islamic faith, because he holds the tenets of Islam in higher esteem than the US Constitution, because the Quran and the Hadith demand that he impose Sharia (Islamic Law) upon American citizens, as a matter of principle and conscience. Does anyone honestly believe that a comment like that would go unnoticed in a New York Times interview?

Representative Stupak took an oath to support and defend the US Constitution. He is openly admitting to violating the Establishment Clause of the Constitution by attempting to establish religious law as US Federal Law. He may not seek recourse under the Free Exercise or Free Speech Clauses, because federal congressional legislation is textbook government speech. He is not acting as a private individual citizen when he acts in his capacity as a US Representative in Congress.

Is there something about the Establishment Clause of the US Constitution, which Representative Stupak fails to understand? I find it fairly straightforward myself. In case you had forgotten, I am including our glorious First Amendment to the United States Constitution: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

There is no religious test for public office, but there should be a competency test for public office, to determine if one is capable of maintaining the separation between church and state, if one is capable of NOT violating the Establishment Clause of the US Constitution, if one is capable of comprehending the difference between government speech and the private speech of an individual citizen.

If immigrants desiring citizenship must take a test that demonstrates their knowledge of the United States Constitution, then maybe we should require the same of our Representatives and Senators, since they are also being asked to take an oath or affirmation to support and defend the Constitution and all.

For the record, I am not Catholic. I reject Roman Catholicism. And, I am deeply and personally offended that Mr. Stupak would abuse his position as a US Congressman by attempting to force me to kneel to Roman Catholic doctrine as a matter of US Federal Law in direct violation of our Constitution.

And, even if I were Catholic, what entitles Representative Stupak to interpret the tenets of Roman Catholicism on my behalf? I didn't realize we had a Theologian Laureate in the United States of America. Thank God for Representative Stupak from Michigan. Thank God we have Representative Stupak to interpret Catholic doctrine and then legislate accordingly on our behalf.

I can sleep easy now. Congress is looking after my spiritual wellbeing. Congress is looking after my soul.

Of course Representative Stupak doesn't care if healthcare reform passes or no. Of course he doesn't care how many American citizens continue to die unnecessarily. He isn't interested in saving our lives. He's interested in saving our souls. For Jesus. Nothing unconstitutional about that.