SANTA
MONICA, Calif. — The elaborate Nativity scenes rose in a city park along the
oceanfront here every December for nearly six decades. More than a dozen
life-size dioramas depicted the Annunciation, Mary and Joseph being turned away
at the inn and, of course, the manger.
This always angered Damon Vix, who worked off and on in Santa Monica and
considers himself a devout atheist, so to speak. How could it be, he asked
himself each year, that the city could condone such an overtly religious
message?
So, a few years ago, he petitioned the city and received his own space, using it
to put up a sign offering “Reason’s Greetings.” But this year, he wanted more.
Mr. Vix gathered a few supporters and applied for dozens of spaces in Palisades
Park, a patch of green on a bluff overlooking the sandy beaches that this city
is famous for.
Suddenly, city officials realized they had far more requests for space than they
could fulfill, they said, and created a lottery. When it was finished, the
atheists had received a vast majority of the spaces. The Christian groups were
forced to choose three scenes from their typical 14.
Now, the city is embroiled in a seasonal controversy it has somehow avoided for
decades.
“We’re trying to balance something that has been a real tradition here and also
live within federal law,” said Barbara Stinchfield, the director of community
services for the city. “We were trying to accommodate all the groups that were
interested in the most fair way we could.”
Ms. Stinchfield has been somewhat surprised at the intensity of the debate —
which has been a hot topic for days in local newspapers and on radio shows and
blogs.
“People keep asking why we do what we do,” she said, sounding a bit weary. “It’s
really a simple answer: the law regulates a park as a traditional public forum,
and we’re trying to do that.”
Hunter Jameson, the president of the group that organizes the Nativity scenes,
said he did not believe the city had done anything wrong. The most “extremely
irksome” issue, he said, is that Mr. Vix and the other atheists seem most
focused on pushing out the Christian scenes. Much of the space the atheists
secured is sitting unused, and for the most part small white signs bearing
secular quotations have replaced the Nativity scenes.
Under the city’s rules, any group was allowed to apply for as many as 14 spaces.
Because Mr. Vix had seven people applying for the maximum amount, they were more
likely to get the spaces in the lottery.
“Rather than use it to put forth a message of their own, they’ve really shown
that their goal is just an effort to take something away rather than give
anything to the community,” Mr. Jameson said. “They’re trying to censor
something that the community has clearly shown it appreciates.”
Adding to his unhappiness, he said, is that none of the atheist applicants live
in Santa Monica. (Mr. Jameson himself lives a few miles away, but attends church
in the city.)
“The idea that religious speech is less protected than other free speech is an
attack on the First Amendment, and the attempt of these people to block us is a
real attack on our rights,” Mr. Jameson said. “This is just our way of saying
‘Merry Christmas.’ ”
Mr. Vix said he had encouraged the atheists to leave some of the spaces blank.
If they put up as many messages as the Christians had, he said, there would be a
backlash, and he predicted that the city would cancel the December tradition
altogether. He also said the atheists had been trying only to receive the same
amount of space that the churches had for years.
Mr. Vix said that from the time he first saw the displays in the early 1990s, he
considered them a “blatant government support of religion.”
“I strongly believe in government and have my whole life,” he said, “and our
founding fathers created the separation of church and state. If we don’t
exercise our rights, we lose them. So I really felt the need to highlight the
inherent problem.”
The Nativity scenes are not the only signs of religion this time of year. Rabbi
Eli Levitansky, who helps to run the Chabad Jewish outreach programs in the
area, said Santa Monica might have the “highest concentration of public
menorahs” of any city in the country. (To keep score: there are 60 such menorahs
scattered across the city’s 8.3 miles.)
Rabbi Levitansky, who grew up in Santa Monica, does not see a problem with the
Nativity scenes and said that most people he knew — religious and not — were
upset about the changes this year. “To come in and create chaos for no reason
whatsoever, other than to just take away from the joy of the holidays for other
people, is shallow and an improper thing to do,” he said.
Annie Laurie Gaylor, co-president of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, said
the Santa Monica situation was “one of the cutest success stories of the
season.” This year, the Wisconsin-based group has put up its own version of a
manger in the Wisconsin State Capitol, with Einstein, Darwin and Emma Goldman
standing as the wise men and a black female doll as the featured infant.
The displays in Santa Monica are not nearly as elaborate. One of Mr. Vix’s
favorite signs sits right in the middle of the park, but few passers-by stopped
one recent afternoon to read the quote from Robert Ingersoll, the 19th-century
writer and orator:
“Happiness is the only good. The time to be happy is now. The place to be happy
is here. The way to be happy is to make others so.”
November
25, 2011
The New York Times
By EMILY BRENNAN
RONNELLE
ADAMS came out to his mother twice, first about his homosexuality, then about
his atheism.
“My mother is very devout,” said Mr. Adams, 30, a Washington resident who has
published an atheist children’s book, “Aching and Praying,” but who in high
school considered becoming a Baptist preacher. “She started telling me her
issues with homosexuality, which were, of course, Biblical,” he said. “ ‘I just
don’t care what the Bible says about that,’ I told her, and she asked why. ‘I
don’t believe that stuff anymore.’ It got silent. She was distraught. She told
me she was more bothered by that than the revelation I was gay.”
This was in 2000, and Mr. Adams did not meet another black atheist in Washington
until 2009, when he found the Facebook group called Black Atheists, which
immediately struck a chord. “I felt like, ‘100 black atheists? Wow!’ ” he said.
In the two years since, Black Atheists has grown to 879 members from that
initial 100, YouTube confessionals have attracted thousands, blogs like “Godless
and Black” have gained followings, and hundreds more have joined Facebook groups
like Black Atheist Alliance (524 members) to share their struggles with “coming
out” about their atheism.
Feeling isolated from religious friends and families and excluded from what it
means to be African-American, people turn to these sites to seek out advice and
understanding, with some of them even finding a date. And having benefited from
the momentum online, organizations like African Americans for Humanism and
Center for Inquiry-Harlem have well-attended meet-up groups, and others like
Black Atheists of America and Black Nonbelievers have been founded.
African-Americans are remarkably religious even for a country known for its
faithfulness, as the United States is. According to the Pew Forum 2008 United
States Religious Landscape Survey, 88 percent of African-Americans believe in
God with absolute certainty, compared with 71 percent of the total population,
with more than half attending religious services at least once a week.
While some black clergy members lament the loss of parishioners to mega-churches
like Rick Warren’s and prosperity-gospel purveyors like Joel Osteen, it is often
taken for granted that African-Americans go to religious services. Islam and
other religions are represented in the black community, but with the assumption
that African-Americans are religious comes the expectation that they are
Christian.
“That’s the kicker, when they ask which church you go to,” said Linda Chavers,
29, a Harvard graduate student. The question comes up among young black
professionals like her classmates as casually as chitchat about classes and
dating. “At first,” she said, “they think it’s because I haven’t found one, and
they’ll say, ‘Oh I know a few great churches,’ and I don’t know a nice way to
say I’m not interested,” she said.
Even among those African-Americans who report no affiliation, more than
two-thirds say religion plays a somewhat important role in their lives,
according to Pew. And some nonbelieving African-Americans have been known to
attend church out of tradition.
“I have some colleagues and friends who identify as culturally Christian in a
way similar to ethnic Jews,” said Josef Sorett, a religion professor at Columbia
University. “They may go to church because that’s the church their family
attends, but they don’t necessarily subscribe to the beliefs of Christianity.”
Given the cultural pull toward religion, less than one-half of a percent of
African-Americans identify themselves as atheists, compared with 1.6 percent of
the total population, according to Pew. Black atheists, then, find they are a
minority within a minority.
In 2008, John Branch made his first YouTube video, “Black Atheism.” With the
camera tight on his face, Mr. Branch, now 27, asks, “What is an atheist? An
atheist is simply someone who lacks a belief in God.” Half kidding, he goes on,
“We’re not drinking blood. We’re not worshiping Satan.” The video has received
more than 40,000 hits.
“I think it attracted so much attention because, in the black community, not
believing in God is seen as a thing for white people,” said Mr. Branch, a
marketing strategist in Raleigh, N.C. “I hate that term, ‘acting white,’ but
it’s used.”
According to Pew, the vast majority of atheists and agnostics are white,
including the authors Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens.
Seeking a public intellectual of their own, some black atheists have claimed the
astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, interpreting his arguments against teaching
intelligent design in the classroom to be an endorsement of atheism. But Dr.
deGrasse Tyson is loath to be associated with any part of the movement. When
contacted last week by e-mail, he noted a Twitter exchange he had in August, in
which he told a follower, “Am I an Atheist, you ask? Labels are mentally lazy
ways by which people assert they know you without knowing you.”
Jamila Bey, a 35-year-old journalist, said, “To be black and atheist, in a lot
of circles, is to not be black.” She said the story the nation tells of
African-Americans’ struggle for civil rights is a Christian one, so
African-Americans who reject religion are seen as turning their backs on their
history. This feels unfair to Ms. Bey, whose mother is Roman Catholic and whose
father is Muslim, because people of different faiths, and some with none, were
in the movement. The black church dominated, she said, because it was the one
independent black institution allowed under Jim Crow laws, providing free spaces
to African-Americans who otherwise faced arrest for congregating in public.
Recognizing the role of churches in the movement, Ms. Bey still takes issue when
their work is retold as God’s. “These people were using the church, pulling from
its resources, to attack a problem and literally change history. But the story
that gets told is, ‘Jesus delivered us,’ ” Ms. Bey said. “Frankly, it was humans
who did all the work.”
Garrett Daniels wrote on the Facebook group page of Black Atheists, “I CAME out
that I’m an atheist to my family.” He added, “I’m not disowned and they
apparently don’t love me any less.” A member responded: “Good for you. Seeking
out religion just to fit in will drive you crazy.”
The Facebook discussion boards for these groups often become therapy sessions,
and as administrator of the Black Atheist Alliance, Mark Hatcher finds himself a
counselor. “My advice is usually let them know you understand their religion and
what they believe, but you have to take a stand,” he said.
This strategy has worked for Mr. Hatcher, 30, a graduate student who started a
secular student group at the historically black Howard University. For two of
his Facebook friends, though, it has not worked, and they moved to Washington,
not to sever ties with their families as much as to keep their sanity.
Now that Facebook groups have connected black atheists, meet-ups have started in
cities like Atlanta, Houston and New York.
On a gray Saturday in October, 40 members of African Americans for Humanism,
including Mr. Hatcher, Ms. Bey and Mr. Adams, met at a restaurant in Washington
to celebrate the first anniversary of holding meet-ups. Speakers discussed plans
to broaden services like tutoring and starting a speaking tour at historically
black colleges.
“Someone’s sitting on the fence, saying, ‘I go to church, and all my friends and
my family are there, how am I supposed to leave?’ ” Mr. Hatcher said on stage.
“That’s where we, as African-American humanists, say, ‘Hey look, we have a
community over here.’ ”
After the speeches, Mr. Hatcher looked at the attendees mingling, laughing,
hugging one another. “I feel like I’m sitting at a family reunion,” he said.
Seated beside Mr. Hatcher was his girlfriend, Ellice Whittington, a 26-year-old
chemical engineer he met through a black atheist Facebook group. He lived in
Washington and she in Denver, so their relationship progressed slowly, she said,
over long e-mails. But Mr. Hatcher said he fell immediately. “We bonded over
music. She loved Prince.”
As for being nonreligious in the black community, Ms. Whittington said, “It
definitely makes your field of candidates a whole lot smaller.”
She added, “It scared some men to hear me say I don’t believe in God the way you
do. I’ve heard people say, ‘How can you love somebody if you don’t believe in
God?’ ”
ON his blog “Words of Wrath,” Wrath James White is an outspoken critic of
Christianity and of African-Americans’ “zealous embracement of the God of our
kidnapper, murders, slave masters and oppressors.”
Though his atheism is a well-worn subject of debate with his wife and his mother
(a minister), Mr. White, a 41-year-old Austin-based writer, avoids discussing it
with the rest of his family. Though he won’t attend Christmas services this
year, and hasn’t in years, he said, his family assumes he’s just “not that
interested in religion.” To say explicitly he is an atheist, he said, “would
break my grandmother’s heart.”
The pressure he feels to quiet his atheism is at the heart of a provocative
statement he makes on his blog: “In most African-American communities, it is
more acceptable to be a criminal who goes to church on Sunday, while selling
drugs to kids all week, than to be an atheist who ... contributes to society and
supports his family.”
Over the phone, Mr. White said he does feel respected for his education and
success, but because he cannot talk freely about his atheism, it ultimately
excludes him. When he lived in Los Angeles, he watched gang members in their
colors enter the church where they were welcomed to shout “Amen” (they had
sinned but had been redeemed) along with everyone else.
“They were free to tell their story,” Mr. White said, while his story about
leaving religion he keeps to himself — and the Internet.
November 21, 2009
Filed at 2:06 p.m. ET
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
AMES, Iowa (AP) -- The sign sits propped on a wooden chair, inviting all
comers: ''Ask an Atheist.''
Whenever a student gets within a few feet, Anastasia Bodnar waves and smiles,
trying to make a good first impression before eyes drift down to a word many
Americans rank down there with ''socialist.''
Bodnar is the happy face of atheism at Iowa State University. Once a week at
this booth at a campus community center, the PhD student who spends most of her
time researching the nutritional traits of corn takes questions and occasional
abuse while trying to raise the profile of religious skepticism.
''A lot of people on campus either don't know we exist or are afraid of us or
hate us,'' says Bodnar, president of the ISU Atheist and Agnostic Society.
''People assume we're rabble-rousing, when we're one of the gentlest groups on
campus.''
As the stigma of atheism has diminished, campus atheists and agnostics are
coming out of the closet, fueling a sharp rise in the number of clubs like the
10-year-old group at Iowa State.
Campus affiliates of the Secular Student Alliance, a sort of Godless Campus
Crusade for Christ, have multiplied from 80 in 2007 to 100 in 2008 and 174 this
fall, providing the atheist movement new training grounds for future leaders. In
another sign of growing acceptance, at least three universities, including
Harvard, now have humanist chaplains meeting the needs of the not-so-spiritual.
With the growth has come soul-searching -- or the atheist equivalent -- about
what secular campus groups should look like. It's part of a broader
self-examination in the atheist movement triggered by the rise of the so-called
''new atheists,'' best-selling authors who denigrate religion and blame it for
the world's ills.
Should student atheist groups go it alone or build bridges with Christian
groups? Organize political protests or quiet discussion groups? Adopt the
militant posture of the new atheists? Or wave and smile?
------
As teenagers move into young adulthood, some leave God behind. But not in huge
numbers.
More than three-quarters of young adults taking part in the National Study of
Youth and Religion profess a belief in God. But almost 7 percent fewer believe
in God as young adults (ages 18 to 23) than did as teenagers, according to the
study, which is tracking the same group of young people as they mature.
What young adults are less likely to believe in is religion. The number of those
who describe themselves as ''not religious'' nearly doubled, to 27 percent, in
young adulthood.
Growing hostility toward religion was found, too. About 1 in 10 young adults are
''irreligious'' -- or actively against religion -- after virtually none of them
fit that description as teenagers.
At Iowa State, most of the club's roughly 30 members are ''former'' somethings,
mostly Christians. Many stress that their lives are guided not by
anti-religiousness, but belief in science, logic and reason.
''The goal,'' said Andrew Severin, a post-doctoral researcher in bioinformatics,
''should a PhD student in biophysics, ''should be to obtain inner peace for
yourself and do random acts of kindness for strangers.''
Severin calls himself a ''spiritual atheist.'' He doesn't believe in God or the
supernatural but thinks experiences like meditation or brushes with nature can
produce biochemical reactions that feel spiritual.
When the ISU club began in 1999, it was mostly a discussion group. But it soon
became clear that young people who leave organized religion miss something: a
sense of community. So the group added movie and board-game nights and, more
recently, twice-monthly Sunday brunches to the calendar.
''It's nice to be around people who aren't going to bash me for believing in
nothing,'' said Bricelyn Rector, a freshman from Sioux City who, like others,
described community as the club's greatest asset.
Members also seek to engage their peers at Iowa State, a 28,000-student science
and technology school where the student body leans conservative. There's a
''Brews and Views'' night at a local coffee house and talks by visiting speakers
common to any college campus.
''This is not a group of angry atheists. It's a group of very exuberant
atheists,'' said faculty sponsor Hector Avalos, a secular humanist and
well-known Biblical scholar who used to be a Pentecostal preacher. ''Their
primary aim is not to destroy the faith of Christians on campus. It's more live
and let live.''
The ''Ask an Atheist'' booth is the club's most visible outreach. On a recent
Friday, a handful of members stand ready to intercept students on their way to
eat lunch or withdraw money from a nearby ATM.
Traffic is slow. Scott Moseley, a Bettendorf, Iowa, senior, stops for a polite
conversation.
He explains that he was raised Methodist, has a Buddhist friend and dates a
Wiccan.
''My entire concept of one religion is kind of out the window,'' Moseley says.
Bodnar, an ex-Catholic married to a Buddhist, recommends the local Unitarian
Universalist congregation, a haven for a grab bag of religious backgrounds and a
few members of the ISU Atheist and Agnostic Society.
The closest thing to a confrontation comes when another student, a baseball cap
pulled tight to his brow, talks briefly about heaven before he mutters, ''I
can't listen to you guys,'' and walks away.
------
On most college campuses, secular groups take shape when non-believing students
arrive and find a couple-dozen Christian groups but no home for them. It isn't
that atheism is necessarily growing among students -- surveys show no uptick in
the number of atheist and agnostic young adults over the last 20 years.
But the greater willingness to speak out, paired with the diversity within the
movement, has resulted is a patchwork of clubs across the country united in
disbelief but different in mission.
At Texas State University in San Marcos, a group of freethinkers led by a former
Lutheran organizes rock-climbing outings and has co-sponsored a debate with a
campus Christian group.
The University of South Florida is home to two active clubs: a freethinkers
group that held a back-to-school barbecue and an atheist group that protested an
anti-abortion group's campus visit.
Still other clubs embrace rituals. At the University of Southern Maine, a
secular humanist organization has celebrated HumanLight, a secular alternative
to Christmas and Hanukkah.
Just in the past year, the Iowa State club has evolved in new directions. Some
are things churches have traditionally done -- like the club's first foray into
volunteerism, sleeping outside in cardboard boxes to raise money for homeless
youth.
Others get at the heart of tensions within the atheist movement. The club worked
with a Methodist church on a gay rights candlelight vigil, a gesture that would
make some atheists cringe.
''The trouble is, any time you start working with other groups, religion starts
coming in,'' said Victor Stenger, an adjunct professor of philosophy at the
University of Colorado and author of ''The New Atheism: Taking a Stand for
Science and Reason.''
''People bring up Jesus, they're trying to proselytize, trying to get people to
go to church,'' Stenger said. ''The atheist groups just can't put up with it.
They have to argue against it.''
More recently, the ISU club's non-confrontational philosophy has been tested by
a debate over the fate of a small chapel at Memorial Union on campus.
The club has avoided taking a position because members are divided. Some want
the chapel's religious symbols -- including an eight-foot wooden cross --
removed on First Amendment grounds. Others fear repercussions and don't think a
fight is worth it.
''The point of the club is not to make waves or controversy,'' said Bodnar,
adding that she is uncomfortable with ''calling out religion as wrong.''
Some club members would like to be more confrontational when circumstances
merit. Junior Brian Gress was interested in participating this fall in a
nationwide ''Blasphemy Day,'' a stick in the eye to religion. But the club
passed and the idea fizzled.
''You should always try to make friends, but there are certain things about
religion that can't be tolerated,'' Gress said. ''Basically, the intolerance of
religion can't be tolerated.''
Most affiliates of the Secular Student Alliance fall somewhere between militant
and why-can't-we-all-just-get-along, said Lyz Liddell, senior campus organizer
for the Columbus, Ohio-based group.
''College students can be a little more susceptible to the more reactionary
anti-religion voices, partly because it's so new to them,'' she said. ''My
impression is after a couple of years, they mellow out.''
Christian Smith, director of the Center for the Study of Religion and Society at
the University of Notre Dame and a principal investigator on the youth and
religion study, said campus atheist groups are better off without militancy.
Young adults are taught their entire lives to be nonjudgmental, that different
points of views are OK and that there is no one truth, he said.
''Emerging adults are just not into trying to make other people be or do
something,'' Smith said. ''If I were advising atheists and humanists, I would
say their long-term prospects are much better if they can successfully create
this space where people view them as happy, OK, cooperative, nice people.''
At Iowa State, what one club member describes as a band of misfits and outcasts
is trying to carve out a space where atheists who raise a fist and atheists who
wave and smile can coexist peacefully.
April 27, 2009
The New York Times
By LAURIE GOODSTEIN
CHARLESTON, S.C. — Two months after the local atheist organization here put
up a billboard saying “Don’t Believe in God? You Are Not Alone,” the group’s 13
board members met in Laura and Alex Kasman’s living room to grapple with the
fallout.
The problem was not that the group, the Secular Humanists of the Lowcountry, had
attracted an outpouring of hostility. It was the opposite. An overflow audience
of more than 100 had showed up for their most recent public symposium, and the
board members discussed whether it was time to find a larger place.
And now parents were coming out of the woodwork asking for family-oriented
programs where they could meet like-minded nonbelievers.
“Is everyone in favor of sponsoring a picnic for humanists with families?” asked
the board president, Jonathan Lamb, a 27-year-old meteorologist, eliciting a
chorus of “ayes.”
More than ever, America’s atheists are linking up and speaking out — even here
in South Carolina, home to Bob Jones University, blue laws and a legislature
that last year unanimously approved a Christian license plate embossed with a
cross, a stained glass window and the words “I Believe” (a move blocked by a
judge and now headed for trial).
They are connecting on the Internet, holding meet-ups in bars, advertising on
billboards and buses, volunteering at food pantries and picking up roadside
trash, earning atheist groups recognition on adopt-a-highway signs.
They liken their strategy to that of the gay-rights movement, which lifted off
when closeted members of a scorned minority decided to go public.
“It’s not about carrying banners or protesting,” said Herb Silverman, a math
professor at the College of Charleston who founded the Secular Humanists of the
Lowcountry, which has about 150 members on the coast of the Carolinas. “The most
important thing is coming out of the closet.”
Polls show that the ranks of atheists are growing. The American Religious
Identification Survey, a major study released last month, found that those who
claimed “no religion” were the only demographic group that grew in all 50 states
in the last 18 years.
Nationally, the “nones” in the population nearly doubled, to 15 percent in 2008
from 8 percent in 1990. In South Carolina, they more than tripled, to 10 percent
from 3 percent. Not all the “nones” are necessarily committed atheists or
agnostics, but they make up a pool of potential supporters.
Local and national atheist organizations have flourished in recent years, fed by
outrage over the Bush administration’s embrace of the religious right. A spate
of best-selling books on atheism also popularized the notion that nonbelief is
not just an argument but a cause, like environmentalism or muscular dystrophy.
Ten national organizations that variously identify themselves as atheists,
humanists, freethinkers and others who go without God have recently united to
form the Secular Coalition for America, of which Mr. Silverman is president.
These groups, once rivals, are now pooling resources to lobby in Washington for
separation of church and state.
A wave of donations, some in the millions of dollars, has enabled the hiring of
more paid professional organizers, said Fred Edwords, a longtime atheist leader
who just started his own umbrella group, the United Coalition of Reason, which
plans to spawn 20 local groups around the country in the next year.
Despite changing attitudes, polls continue to show that atheists are ranked
lower than any other minority or religious group when Americans are asked
whether they would vote for or approve of their child marrying a member of that
group.
Over lunch with some new atheist joiners at a downtown Charleston restaurant
serving shrimp and grits, one young mother said that her husband was afraid to
allow her to go public as an atheist because employers would refuse to hire him.
But another member, Beverly Long, a retired school administrator who now teaches
education at the Citadel, said that when she first moved to Charleston from
Toronto in 2001, “the first question people asked me was, What church do you
belong to?” Ms. Long attended Wednesday dinners at a Methodist church, for the
social interaction, but never felt at home. Since her youth, she had doubted the
existence of God but did not discuss her views with others.
Ms. Long found the secular humanists through a newspaper advertisement and
attended a meeting. Now, she is ready to go public, she said, especially after
doing some genealogical research recently. “I had ancestors who fought in the
American Revolution so I could speak my mind,” she said.
Until recent years, the Secular Humanists of the Lowcountry were local pariahs.
Mr. Silverman — whose specialty license plate, one of many offered by the state,
says “In Reason We Trust” — was invited to give the invocation at the Charleston
City Council once, but half the council members walked out. The local chapter of
Habitat for Humanity would not let the Secular Humanists volunteer to build
houses wearing T-shirts that said “Non Prophet Organization,” he said.
When their billboard went up in January, with their Web site address displayed
prominently, they expected hate mail.
“But most of the e-mails were grateful,” said Laura Kasman, an assistant
professor of microbiology and immunology at the Medical University of South
Carolina.
The board members meeting in the Kasmans’ living room were an unlikely mix that
included a gift store owner, a builder, a grandmother, a retired nursing
professor, a retired Navy officer, an administrator at a primate sanctuary and a
church musician. They are also diverse in their attitudes toward religion.
Loretta Haskell, the church musician, said: “I did struggle at one point as to
whether or not I should be making music in churches, given my position on
things. But at the same time I like using my music to move people, to give them
comfort. And what I’ve found is, I am not one of the humanists who feels that
religion is a bad thing.”
The group has had mixed reactions to President Obama, who acknowledged
nonbelievers in his inauguration speech. “I sent him a thank-you note,” Ms.
Kasman said. But Sharon Fratepietro, who is married to Mr. Silverman, said, “It
seemed like one long religious ceremony, with a moment of lip service.”
Part of what is giving the movement momentum is the proliferation of groups on
college campuses. The Secular Student Alliance now has 146 chapters, up from 42
in 2003.
At the University of South Carolina, in Columbia, 19 students showed up for a
recent evening meeting of the “Pastafarians,” named for the Church of the Flying
Spaghetti Monster — a popular spoof on religion dreamed up by an opponent of
intelligent design, the idea that living organisms are so complex that the best
explanation is that a higher intelligence designed them.
Andrew Cederdahl, the group’s co-founder, asked for volunteers for the local
food bank and for a coming debate with a nearby Christian college. Then Mr.
Cederdahl opened the floor to members to tell their “coming out stories.”
Andrew Morency, who attended a Christian high school, said that when he got to
college and studied evolutionary biology he decided that “creationists lie.”
Josh Streetman, who once attended the very Christian college that the
Pastafarians were about to debate, said he knew the Bible too well to be sure
that Scripture is true. Like Mr. Streetman, many of the other students at the
meeting were highly literate in the Bible and religious history.
In keeping with the new generation of atheist evangelists, the Pastafarian
leaders say that their goal is not confrontation, or even winning converts, but
changing the public’s stereotype of atheists. A favorite Pastafarian activity is
to gather at a busy crossroads on campus with a sign offering “Free Hugs” from
“Your Friendly Neighborhood Atheist.”
The answer to the problems of free speech
is always more free speech
Friday, 13 February 2009
The Independent
Last week, I wrote an article defending free speech for everyone – and in
response there have been riots, death threats, and the arrest of an editor who
published the article.
Here's how it happened. My column reported on a startling development at the
United Nations. The UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights has always had the job
of investigating governments who forcibly take the fundamental human right to
free speech from their citizens with violence. But in the past year, a coalition
of religious fundamentalist states has successfully fought to change her job
description. Now, she has to report on "abuses of free expression" including
"defamation of religions and prophets." Instead of defending free speech, she
must now oppose it.
I argued this was a symbol of how religious fundamentalists – of all stripes –
have been progressively stripping away the right to freely discuss their faiths.
They claim religious ideas are unique and cannot be discussed freely; instead,
they must be "respected" – by which they mean unchallenged. So now, whenever
anyone on the UN Human Rights Council tries to discuss the stoning of
"adulterous" women, the hanging of gay people, or the marrying off of ten year
old girls to grandfathers, they are silenced by the chair on the grounds these
are "religious" issues, and it is "offensive" to talk about them.
This trend is not confined to the UN. It has spread deep into democratic
countries. Whenever I have reported on immoral acts by religious fanatics –
Catholic, Jewish, Hindu or Muslim – I am accused of "prejudice", and I am not
alone. But my only "prejudice" is in favour of individuals being able to choose
to live their lives, their way, without intimidation. That means choosing
religion, or rejecting it, as they wish, after hearing an honest, open argument.
A religious idea is just an idea somebody had a long time ago, and claimed to
have received from God. It does not have a different status to other ideas; it
is not surrounded by an electric fence none of us can pass.
That's why I wrote: "All people deserve respect, but not all ideas do. I don't
respect the idea that a man was born of a virgin, walked on water and rose from
the dead. I don't respect the idea that we should follow a "Prophet" who at the
age of 53 had sex with a nine-year old girl, and ordered the murder of whole
villages of Jews because they wouldn't follow him. I don't respect the idea that
the West Bank was handed to Jews by God and the Palestinians should be bombed or
bullied into surrendering it. I don't respect the idea that we may have lived
before as goats, and could live again as woodlice. When you demand "respect",
you are demanding we lie to you. I have too much real respect for you as a human
being to engage in that charade."
An Indian newspaper called The Statesman – one of the oldest and most venerable
dailies in the country – thought this accorded with the rich Indian tradition of
secularism, and reprinted the article. That night, four thousand Islamic
fundamentalists began to riot outside their offices, calling for me, the editor,
and the publisher to be arrested – or worse. They brought Central Calcutta to a
standstill. A typical supporter of the riots, Abdus Subhan, said he was
"prepared to lay down his life, if necessary, to protect the honour of the
Prophet" and I should be sent "to hell if he chooses not to respect any religion
or religious symbol? He has no liberty to vilify or blaspheme any religion or
its icons on grounds of freedom of speech."
Then, two days ago, the editor and publisher were indeed arrested. They have
been charged – in the world's largest democracy, with a constitution supposedly
guaranteeing a right to free speech – with "deliberately acting with malicious
intent to outrage religious feelings". I am told I too will be arrested if I go
to Calcutta.
What should an honest defender of free speech say in this position? Every word I
wrote was true. I believe the right to openly discuss religion, and follow the
facts wherever they lead us, is one of the most precious on earth – especially
in a democracy of a billion people riven with streaks of fanaticism from a
minority of Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs. So I cannot and will not apologize.
I did not write a sectarian attack on any particular religion of the kind that
could lead to a rerun of India's hellish anti-Muslim or anti-Sikh pogroms, but
rather a principled critique of all religions who try to forcibly silence their
critics. The right to free speech I am defending protects Muslims as much as
everyone else. I passionately support their right to say anything they want – as
long as I too have the right to respond.
It's worth going through the arguments put forward by the rioting
fundamentalists, because they will keep recurring in the twenty-first century as
secularism is assaulted again and again. They said I had upset "the harmony" of
India, and it could only be restored by my arrest. But this is a lop-sided
vision of "harmony". It would mean that religious fundamentalists are free to
say whatever they want – and the rest of us have to shut up and agree.
The protestors said I deliberately set out to "offend" them, and I am supposed
to say that, no, no offence was intended. But the honest truth is more
complicated. Offending fundamentalists isn't my goal – but if it is an
inevitable side-effect of defending human rights, so be it. If fanatics who
believe Muslim women should be imprisoned in their homes and gay people should
be killed are insulted by my arguments, I don't resile from it. Nothing worth
saying is inoffensive to everyone.
You do not have a right to be ring-fenced from offence. Every day, I am offended
– not least by ancient religious texts filled with hate-speech. But I am glad,
because I know that the price of taking offence is that I can give it too, if
that is where the facts lead me. But again, the protestors propose a lop-sided
world. They do not propose to stop voicing their own heinously offensive views
about women's rights or homosexuality, but we have to shut up and take it – or
we are the ones being "insulting".
It's also worth going through the arguments of the Western defenders of these
protestors, because they too aren't going away. Already I have had e-mails and
bloggers saying I was "asking for it" by writing a "needlessly provocative"
article. When there is a disagreement and one side uses violence, it is a
reassuring rhetorical stance to claim both sides are in the wrong, and you take
a happy position somewhere in the middle. But is this true? I wrote an article
defending human rights, and stating simple facts. Fanatics want to arrest or
kill me for it. Is there equivalence here?
The argument that I was "asking for it" seems a little like saying a woman
wearing a short skirt is "asking" to be raped. Or, as Salman Rushdie wrote when
he received far, far worse threats simply for writing a novel (and a masterpiece
at that): "When Osip Mandelstam wrote his poem against Stalin, did he ‘know what
he was doing' and so deserve his death? When the students filled Tiananmen
Square to ask for freedom, were they not also, and knowingly, asking for the
murderous repression that resulted? When Terry Waite was taken hostage, hadn't
he been ‘asking for it'?" When fanatics threaten violence against people who
simply use words, you should not blame the victim.
These events are also a reminder of why it is so important to try to let the
oxygen of rationality into religious debates – and introduce doubt. Voltaire –
one of the great anti-clericalists – said: "Those who can make you believe
absurdities can make you commit atrocities." If you can be made to believe the
absurd notion that an invisible deity dictated The Eternal Unchanging Truth to a
specific person at a specific time in history and anyone who questions this is
Evil, then you can easily be made to demand the death of journalists and free
women and homosexuals who question that Truth. But if they have a moment of
doubt – if there is a single nagging question at the back of their minds – then
they are more likely to hesitate. That's why these ideas must be challenged at
their core, using words and reason.
But the fundamentalists are determined not to allow those rational ideas to be
heard – because at some level they know they will persuade for many people,
especially children and teenagers in the slow process of being indoctrinated.
If, after all the discussion and all the facts about how contradictory and
periodically vile their ‘holy' texts are, religious people still choose
fanatical faith, I passionately defend their right to articulate it. Free speech
is for the stupid and the wicked and the wrong – whether it is fanatics or the
racist Geert Wilders – just as much as for the rational and the right. All I say
is that they do not have the right to force it on other people or silence the
other side. In this respect, Wilders resembles the Islamists he professes to
despise: he wants to ban the Koran. Fine. Let him make his argument. He
discredits himself by speaking such ugly nonsense.
The solution to the problems of free speech – that sometimes people will say
terrible things – is always and irreducibly more free speech. If you don't like
what a person says, argue back. Make a better case. Persuade people. The best
way to discredit a bad argument is to let people hear it. I recently interviewed
the pseudo-historian David Irving, and simply quoting his crazy arguments did
far more harm to him than any Austrian jail sentence for Holocaust Denial.
Please do not imagine that if you defend these rioters, you are defending
ordinary Muslims. If we allow fanatics to silence all questioning voices, the
primary victims today will be Muslim women, Muslim gay people, and the many good
and honourable Muslim men who support them. Imagine what Britain would look like
now if everybody who offered dissenting thoughts about Christianity in the
seventeenth century and since was intimidated into silence by the mobs and
tyrants who wanted to preserve the most literalist and fanatical readings of the
Bible. Imagine how women and gay people would live.
You can see this if you compare my experience to that of journalists living
under religious-Islamist regimes. Because generations of British people sought
to create a secular space, when I went to the police, they offered total
protection. When they go to the police, they are handed over to the fanatics –
or charged for their "crimes." They are people like Sayed Pervez Kambaksh, the
young Afghan journalism student who was sentenced to death for downloading a
report on women's rights. They are people like the staff of Zanan, one of Iran's
leading reform-minded women's magazines, who have been told they will be jailed
if they carry on publishing. They are people like the 27-year old Muslim blogger
Abdel Rahman who has been seized, jailed and tortured in Egypt for arguing for a
reformed Islam that does not enforce shariah law.
It would be a betrayal of them – and the tens of thousands of journalists like
them – to apologize for what I wrote. Yes, if we speak out now, there will be
turbulence and threats, and some people may get hurt. But if we fall silent – if
we leave the basic human values of free speech, feminism and gay rights
undefended in the face of violent religious mobs – then many, many more people
will be hurt in the long term. Today, we have to use our right to criticise
religion – or lose it.
And finally, If you are appalled by the erosion of secularism across the
world and want to do something about it, there are a number of organizations you
can join, volunteer for or donate to.
Even donating a few hours or a few pounds can really make a difference to
defending people subject to religious oppression – by providing them with legal
help, education materials, and lobbying for changes in the law.
Whenever a religious belief is criticised,
its adherents say they're victims of
'prejudice'
Wednesday, 28 January 2009
The Independent
The right to criticise religion is being slowly doused in acid. Across the
world, the small, incremental gains made by secularism – giving us the space to
doubt and question and make up our own minds – are being beaten back by
belligerent demands that we "respect" religion. A historic marker has just been
passed, showing how far we have been shoved. The UN rapporteur who is supposed
to be the global guardian of free speech has had his job rewritten – to put him
on the side of the religious censors.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights stated 60 years ago that "a world
in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief is the highest
aspiration of the common people". It was a Magna Carta for mankind – and loathed
by every human rights abuser on earth. Today, the Chinese dictatorship calls it
"Western", Robert Mugabe calls it "colonialist", and Dick Cheney calls it
"outdated". The countries of the world have chronically failed to meet it – but
the document has been held up by the United Nations as the ultimate standard
against which to check ourselves. Until now.
Starting in 1999, a coalition of Islamist tyrants, led by Saudi Arabia, demanded
the rules be rewritten. The demand for everyone to be able to think and speak
freely failed to "respect" the "unique sensitivities" of the religious, they
decided – so they issued an alternative Islamic Declaration of Human Rights. It
insisted that you can only speak within "the limits set by the shariah [law]. It
is not permitted to spread falsehood or disseminate that which involves
encouraging abomination or forsaking the Islamic community".
In other words, you can say anything you like, as long as it precisely what the
reactionary mullahs tell you to say. The declaration makes it clear there is no
equality for women, gays, non-Muslims, or apostates. It has been backed by the
Vatican and a bevy of Christian fundamentalists.
Incredibly, they are succeeding. The UN's Rapporteur on Human Rights has always
been tasked with exposing and shaming those who prevent free speech – including
the religious. But the Pakistani delegate recently demanded that his job
description be changed so he can seek out and condemn "abuses of free
expression" including "defamation of religions and prophets". The council agreed
– so the job has been turned on its head. Instead of condemning the people who
wanted to murder Salman Rushdie, they will be condemning Salman Rushdie himself.
Anything which can be deemed "religious" is no longer allowed to be a subject of
discussion at the UN – and almost everything is deemed religious. Roy Brown of
the International Humanist and Ethical Union has tried to raise topics like the
stoning of women accused of adultery or child marriage. The Egyptian delegate
stood up to announce discussion of shariah "will not happen" and "Islam will not
be crucified in this council" – and Brown was ordered to be silent. Of course,
the first victims of locking down free speech about Islam with the imprimatur of
the UN are ordinary Muslims.
Here is a random smattering of events that have taken place in the past week in
countries that demanded this change. In Nigeria, divorced women are routinely
thrown out of their homes and left destitute, unable to see their children, so a
large group of them wanted to stage a protest – but the Shariah police declared
it was "un-Islamic" and the marchers would be beaten and whipped. In Saudi
Arabia, the country's most senior government-approved cleric said it was
perfectly acceptable for old men to marry 10-year-old girls, and those who
disagree should be silenced. In Egypt, a 27-year-old Muslim blogger Abdel Rahman
was seized, jailed and tortured for arguing for a reformed Islam that does not
enforce shariah.
To the people who demand respect for Muslim culture, I ask: which Muslim
culture? Those women's, those children's, this blogger's – or their oppressors'?
As the secular campaigner Austin Darcy puts it: "The ultimate aim of this effort
is not to protect the feelings of Muslims, but to protect illiberal Islamic
states from charges of human rights abuse, and to silence the voices of internal
dissidents calling for more secular government and freedom."
Those of us who passionately support the UN should be the most outraged by this.
Underpinning these "reforms" is a notion seeping even into democratic societies
– that atheism and doubt are akin to racism. Today, whenever a religious belief
is criticised, its adherents immediately claim they are the victims of
"prejudice" – and their outrage is increasingly being backed by laws.
All people deserve respect, but not all ideas do. I don't respect the idea that
a man was born of a virgin, walked on water and rose from the dead. I don't
respect the idea that we should follow a "Prophet" who at the age of 53 had sex
with a nine-year old girl, and ordered the murder of whole villages of Jews
because they wouldn't follow him.
I don't respect the idea that the West Bank was handed to Jews by God and the
Palestinians should be bombed or bullied into surrendering it. I don't respect
the idea that we may have lived before as goats, and could live again as
woodlice. This is not because of "prejudice" or "ignorance", but because there
is no evidence for these claims. They belong to the childhood of our species,
and will in time look as preposterous as believing in Zeus or Thor or Baal.
When you demand "respect", you are demanding we lie to you. I have too much real
respect for you as a human being to engage in that charade.
But why are religious sensitivities so much more likely to provoke demands for
censorship than, say, political sensitivities? The answer lies in the nature of
faith. If my views are challenged I can, in the end, check them against reality.
If you deregulate markets, will they collapse? If you increase carbon dioxide
emissions, does the climate become destabilised? If my views are wrong, I can
correct them; if they are right, I am soothed.
But when the religious are challenged, there is no evidence for them to consult.
By definition, if you have faith, you are choosing to believe in the absence of
evidence. Nobody has "faith" that fire hurts, or Australia exists; they know it,
based on proof. But it is psychologically painful to be confronted with the fact
that your core beliefs are based on thin air, or on the empty shells of
revelation or contorted parodies of reason. It's easier to demand the source of
the pesky doubt be silenced.
But a free society cannot be structured to soothe the hardcore faithful. It is
based on a deal. You have an absolute right to voice your beliefs – but the
price is that I too have a right to respond as I wish. Neither of us can set
aside the rules and demand to be protected from offence.
Yet this idea – at the heart of the Universal Declaration – is being lost. To
the right, it thwacks into apologists for religious censorship; to the left, it
dissolves in multiculturalism. The hijacking of the UN Special Rapporteur by
religious fanatics should jolt us into rescuing the simple, battered idea
disintegrating in the middle: the equal, indivisible human right to speak
freely.
On a morning of countless firsts in U.S. history, add this: Barack Obama's
inaugural speech is the first time a president has ever explicitly acknowledged
not only "Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus" but non-believers as well.
"This inclusiveness is a signature moment in American inaugural history," says
David Domke, professor of communications at the University of Washington in
Seattle, who has analyzed religious language in seven decades of inaugural and
State of the Union addresses.
Obama's speech was "right in the middle" of recent presidents in the number of
references to God — more than Reagan, fewer than George W. Bush — according to
Domke's tally.
Even so, "You could hear beneath it all references to God-given promise,
God's calls on us, God's grace on us, and the frequent use of 'shall' in that
King James-ian English of the Bible and early translations of Jewish prayer
books," adds Marvin Kranz, an American history expert at the Library of Congress
before his retirement.
Yet in its rhetoric and references, and in Obama's "almost musical delivery," it
was thoroughly expressive of a black and Christian man, even as it stretched
wide to cover all Americans, says Eddie Glaude, professor of religion and
African-American studies at Princeton University in Princeton, N.J.
Obama stood on Scripture, paraphrasing Paul's words in I Corinthians 13:11 that
the time has come to "put away childish things."
"He spoke in the grandest of the black church tradition when he talked about
how, in the darkest of hours, you have to find the strength to see past the
opacity of your condition, to have vision when there's no light. I was moved by
his facial expressions, too: the biting of the lip, the furrow of the brow, the
momentary pauses so you have a sense of the gravitas of the situation," says
Glaude.
Glaude also notes that Obama's "refutation of the Bush era, right in front of
Bush," was firm but gracefully done, serving as "a wonderful model of civil
disagreement. (He was saying) we are all in need of the grace and the love of
God because these are some difficult days ahead indeed."
Obama also selected two powerful pastors to open and close Tuesday's ceremony,
and 19 clergy and religious leaders will speak at the National Prayer Service at
the National Cathedral.
California mega-church pastor Rick Warren, under fire from gay rights activists
for his stand against same-sex marriage, gave an inaugural invocation that began
with the Hebrew Shema, ("Hear, oh Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One,")
and concluded with the Lord's Prayer. While Warren dedicated his own words to
Jesus, he didn't ask the millions of viewers to signify to evangelical faith
with an "amen."
